Archive of Our Own

“…so then he looks at me, right in the middle of the prayer circle—like right in the middle of ‘Lord, we just wanna thank you’—and he goes, ‘We all know why Rae’s really here.’”

They pulled a face, hand fluttering in mock sanctimony as they leaned back on their elbows. The circle around them shifted, boots scuffing on the scuffed hardwood floor. Someone’s empty plastic cup crackled when Dante’s heel rolled over it.

“And I’m just sitting there with my stupid little WWJD bracelet,” Rae went on, “thinking ‘apparently he’d out the queer kid for free entertainment?’”

Mo snorted first, a short, involuntary burst of laughter they clamped a hand over immediately. Dante followed with a low, incredulous chuckle, head tilting back against the lip of the low stage. Lena’s laugh came quiet and sharp, more air than sound, as she hugged her bass case closer to her chest.

The laughter spread around the circle like a nervous tic, too loud for the size of the room and the hour. It bounced off the stacked metal chairs along the walls, off the bare rafters and the blacked-out windows. It sounded like they were laughing at the story. None of them were.

Rae felt it as a tremor in their own chest—something brittle and sharp that giggled so it would not crack. They pushed their hair back from their eyes, grinning too wide.

“Anyway,” they finished, letting the words fall in a flat, practiced cadence, “starting to think Jesus maybe didn’t personally sign off on that one.”

Another round of laughter. Less forced, but no warmer.

Coiled cables lay in lazy circles around them, snaking out from the base of the stage like shed skins. There were half-packed pedalboards open beside Dante, a milk crate of tangled extension cords by Mo’s knee. Someone had killed the PA twenty minutes ago and draped a black cloth over the main speakers; they loomed beside the stage like sleeping giants.

Only one row of fluorescents hummed near the back doors, giving everything a washed-out, late-night yellow. The rest of the hall—the folding chairs leaning in precarious stacks, the merch table still littered with zines and handwritten cassette tracklists—sat in a shallow dusk.

“I’m sorry they did that to you,” the small woman across from Rae said.

She spoke like she was commenting on the weather, or on a scratch in the floorboards. There was no ceremonial hush given to the sentence, no careful lead-in. Just six words, dropped gently between them like a mug set on a table.

Rae’s smile faltered. The others’ laughter hitched and died.

Her voice was softer than the electric hiss in the ceiling, but it carried. Maybe because everything else in the building was winding down: the muffled clatter out in the corridor where someone pushed a trolley, the distant bassline from another room disappearing as an amp finally clicked off.

“I mean it,” Jennifer added, when no one spoke. “That was wrong. I’m sorry.”

She had her legs crossed under her, hands cupped around a styrofoam cup that had long since stopped steaming. The cup left a faint wet ring on the floorboards when she shifted it from one palm to the other. Her coat—too big, borrowed, the sort local church volunteers kept on a hook for people who turned up underdressed in winter—bunched at the shoulders and made her look smaller, not larger.

Rae looked down at their hands, flexed the fingers that used to knot themselves white around youth-group chairs. “Yeah, well,” they said, softer now. “Could’ve been worse. They could’ve tried to pray it out in tongues. We only got the budget version.”

That got a flicker of a smile out of Lena; she dropped her chin toward her chest, letting her curls hide it. Mo began tapping the butt of a drumstick against their own knee in a slow, uneven rhythm, the sound a little too bright in the near-quiet.

Dante didn’t laugh this time. He ran his hand through his hair and left it there, elbow propped on his up-drawn knee. His foot jogged restlessly, heel thudding a tiny, repetitive heartbeat against the floor. It had been doing that for the last fifteen minutes. He seemed unaware of it.

“You were what, sixteen?” Not probing, more like she was double-checking a chord she already half-knew.

“Fifteen,” Rae said. “They bumped me up a year so I could get saved faster.”

They tried to make that funny. It almost worked. The corner of their mouth twitched, but their eyes stayed flat.

Jennifer nodded once, slow. Her eyes were the kind that seemed to rest on people rather than examine them—dark, clear, not quite focused on any one person for long. She glanced around the circle, briefly catching each of their faces, as if to see who else was holding their breath.

“We were never allowed bracelets,” she said after a moment, tilting the cup carefully so the dregs didn’t slosh. “We had Bibles wrapped in butcher paper so no one could see if they were falling apart.”

Rae blinked. The remark landed sideways, not a joke exactly, but something dented and dry. A few beats passed while the image filtered through—the idea of a Bible hidden because of shame rather than displayed as proof.

Dante’s foot tapped faster. He was barely aware his gaze kept sliding back to her, then away again. He knew who she was—had known the second their friend in the doorway said her name. The knowledge sat in his chest like a separate heartbeat, oddly detached from the scene itself. It made it hard to look straight at her for long.

Mo slid the stick into their other hand, then back again. They kept rearranging their legs, sitting cross-legged, then stretching them out, then folding them again. The sticks clicked periodically against the floor as if they might accidentally start a beat and turn this conversation into soundcheck.

Lena rolled the bass case slightly back and forth under her palms, listening.

“I’m not…” Rae began, then stopped, their gaze fixed on Jennifer’s hands. “I mean, I’m not, like… fishing for—”

“I know,” Jennifer said. She let them off the hook with another of those small nods. “You’re telling a story. Stories like that bruise. Sometimes it helps to laugh.”
It was the first time Rae properly met her eyes. Up close, there were more lines there than they’d expected, fan-brushed at the corners, soft creases at the mouth. Not the neat, airbrushed face from that one half-blurry photo the zine had run next to an article about “the woman who won’t be recorded.” Not a saint, not an icon. Just someone’s tired aunt in a borrowed coat, sitting on a church hall floor long after all the kids had gone home.

Rae had to remind themself to breathe.

“No offense,” Mo said, voice low but breaking the hush anyway, “but if any of my Sunday school teachers had said that in 1984, I might’ve actually listened.”

Their joke sat on top of something heavier. Jennifer smiled at them, a little sideways. “Maybe they were busy counting attendance,” she suggested.

Dante made a small choking noise that might have been a laugh. His heel slowed on the wooden floor.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” he said. “Counting heads, counting sins.”

He said it with more bite than he’d intended. The words came out sharper than the room seemed built for now that the amps were off. He rubbed over the seam of his jeans with his thumb to work the tension out of his voice.

Jennifer didn’t correct him. Her gaze flicked briefly toward the half-dark ceiling, where banners from past church potlucks and youth events still hung: faded construction-paper letters, one crooked banner reading WELCOME FRIENDS in peeling marker.

“That’s what they thought their job was,” she said. “Counting. Tallying. Making sure they could tell God how many they’d ushered in and how many they’d thrown out.”

“And how many they’d scared shitless,” Rae added.

There was a beat where silence threatened to turn heavy. Then someone laughed again, softer this time, shared rather than defensive. It wasn’t even clear who started it.

Jennifer’s cup made a tiny tap as she set it down, empty now, beside her knee. She tucked her hands into her sleeves to warm her fingers and shifted her weight, ankles crossing. The gesture was unassuming, almost shy. The air in the circle loosened by a degree.

Out near the blown-out stack of chairs, the building’s night caretaker pushed a trolley past the doors. The rattle of wheels on linoleum drifted into the hall for a moment and then receded, leaving only the low hum of the heater trying to restart and the faint buzz of the exit sign over the back door.

Rae cleared their throat, suddenly aware of how much of the talking they’d done. “Anyway,” they said, wrapping their arms around their knees, pulling them closer to their chest, “that was the night I decided Jesus needed better PR.”

Mo huffed a quiet laugh. Dante’s mouth curled up at the corners despite himself. Lena shook her head, smiling down at the faded sticker half-peeled from her case.

This time, the laughter that followed landed differently—less like armor, more like the air coming back into the room after a long set.

It was Mo who broke the little silence first, spinning the spare drumstick between their fingers like a slow propeller.
“So,” they said, “do you… uh. Do you actually know who we are? Like, besides ‘those four kids who made a lot of noise just now.’”

Jennifer glanced at them, amused. “I heard someone say your name when you started,” she said. “But the speakers were still buzzing and my ears are older than yours. I only caught the ‘Summer’ bit.”

Rae perked up a little. “Indiana Summer,” they supplied. “That’s us.”

“Indiana Summer,” she repeated, tasting the syllables. Her eyes half-closed for a second, like she was holding it up to the light inside her head. “That sounds like the part of the year that pretends it isn’t ending yet.”

Mo frowned, then smiled as the image caught up. Dante actually stopped jiggling his leg.

“That’s… yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s not bad.”

“It was a joke at first,” Lena said. She shifted the bass case off her lap and let it rest on its side, fingers still hooked around the handle. “We needed a name for a house show and ‘Indian Summer’ was already on the flyer as the theme? Like, some dude thought it sounded poetic for a basement party. So Dante crossed it out and wrote ‘Indiana’ above it in Sharpie.”

“Defacing the sacred photocopy,” Mo added.

“It was a dumb pun,” Rae said. “The kind you write thinking you’ll change it before anyone sees, and then the show happens, and then somehow you’re stuck with it for the rest of your natural life.”

Dante grinned, remembering. “Promoter was like, ‘Cool, I’ll put you in the zine like that.’ And suddenly we were Indiana Summer in print. Couldn’t go back without, you know, a legal name-change and a press release.”

Jennifer nodded like she’d just been given the last piece of a story she’d half-heard somewhere. “Names are stubborn,” she said. “They stick to you before you know whether they fit.”

“It does kind of fit, though,” Lena admitted. She shrugged one shoulder, the movement small enough that her denim jacket barely rustled. “It’s that thing where it’s October and it’s still weirdly hot and everyone’s kind of happy and kind of freaked out at the same time.”

“Like the weather’s lying to you,” Mo said.

“Like the world forgot what season it was supposed to be in,” Rae added.

Jennifer’s eyes crinkled. “A wrong season that’s still tender with you,” she said. “That’s what it sounds like, from over here.”

Dante ran his thumb along the edge of a stompbox case until he could feel the plastic dig into the skin. He’d said variations of this in half a dozen notebooks, on the back of flyers and in margin notes of political pamphlets, but never out loud to anyone who might actually understand why it mattered.

“We kind of write for that,” he said.

“For… weather reports?” Mo said dryly.

“For those weeks,” Dante said, not taking the bait. He was looking past them now, toward the shadowed far wall where a faded poster for a long-ago harvest festival still clung, corners curling. “When it’s too warm for October and everyone knows something’s off but no one can say what. We write for that.”

Rae watched him, biting their lower lip. They’d heard him say things like this while they were working on lyrics, pacing the kitchen with a pen in hand, but it sounded different here, sitting in an empty hall with coiled cables around their ankles and this woman listening like every syllable counted.

“Like…” Dante struggled for it a second, then found it. “Like you’re living in the wrong season and the right one’s running late, stuck in traffic somewhere. And you’re trying to figure out if the delay is good news or bad.”

“Wrong-season kids,” Mo said quietly.

“Yeah.” Dante’s mouth tugged sideways, rueful. “We’ve been calling ourselves that since high school. Wrong-season kids in the wrong state, wrong decade, wrong families. Just waiting for the weather to catch up.”

Jennifer’s gaze settled on him for a moment, steady and warm, then moved slowly around the circle again. She seemed to be measuring what he’d said against a map only she could see.

“That’s Neu Punk,” she said.

Rae blinked. “What, being bad with calendars?”

“Writing for the wrong-season kids,” she said. “The ones who never fit the glossy brochures or the youth-group testimonies. The ones the radio songs forgot to mention. That’s all Neu Punk ever really tried to do.”

She said “Neu Punk” with the easy familiarity of someone who’d watched the term get invented, argued over, stapled to telephone poles and scrawled on bathroom stalls. She didn’t overemphasize it, didn’t claim it. It was just a shared language, offered across the circle.

“You make it sound like an actual… thing,” Mo said. “I thought we were just a handful of bands with broken amps and too many feelings.”

“You are,” she said. “But so were we, when we didn’t have a name yet. We just knew we were singing about the kids the Pietà never carried. The ones who got left at the bus stop when the Rapture didn’t happen.”

Rae let out a startled laugh. “That’s… bleak.”

“It’s accurate,” Dante said under his breath.

Jennifer picked up her empty cup again, turning it slowly between her palms. The styrofoam squeaked faintly. “You know,” she went on, “in Ohio we didn’t talk about seasons much. The church calendar had more to say than the weather did. Advent, Lent, Pentecost. Little colors on the cloth, little readings. But the wrong-season kids? They were the ones who didn’t match any of the readings, no matter how many Sundays you counted.”

“Like what?” Lena asked, genuinely curious.

“Like the girl who skipped half of sixth grade because her stepfather assaulted her and the church prayed for him and never asked where she slept on school nights,” Jennifer said quietly. “Like the boy who loved boys and learned to sing in a voice so gentle it could have put the whole congregation to sleep, and then left town one day and never wrote back. People were told to stop asking about him.”

The floorboards seemed to grow still under them. Even the exit sign’s buzz dimmed in the moment.

“Everyone knew they were there,” she said. “They just weren’t in any of the stories that were given. So we made different stories. Different songs. Ones that said, ‘You’re not a mistake, you’re just early. Or late. You’re weather God didn’t plan for, and that’s fine.’”

Rae’s throat felt tight, as if someone had wrapped a mic cable around it one coil too many. “That’s what we’re trying to do,” they said. “With, y’know. Less Bible.”

“There’s no Scripture in saying the world isn’t arranged properly,” Jennifer replied. “That’s just… observation.”

Mo shifted again, pulling one knee up and resting their cheek against it. “So when you hear ‘Indiana Summer,’” they asked, “you hear… what, exactly?”

She turned the question over seriously, the way someone might turn over a new chord change.

“I hear a room that’s still warm when the thermostat says it should be cold,” she said. “I hear kids who were told the show was over, who’re still here anyway with their instruments plugged in. I hear cornfields and freight trains and cul-de-sacs full of for-sale signs, and four stubborn hearts saying, ‘No, actually, we’re not done yet.’”

Dante’s eyes flicked down, suddenly shy. Rae stared at a scuff mark between them, the shape of it blurring.

“That sounds… nicer than it is,” Lena said after a moment. “Sometimes it’s just us in a VFW hall with sticky floors and one working monitor.”

“Sometimes it’s just me in somebody’s kitchen singing to three kids who haven’t slept properly in a month,” Jennifer said. “We don’t get to decide how big the room is. We just decide who we’re singing to when we open our mouths.”

“Wrong-season kids,” Mo repeated softly.

She nodded. “Kids who feel like summer in November or frost in June. Kids whose timing doesn’t match the bulletin. That’s who Neu Punk always belonged to. Indiana Summer’s just… an honest name for that.”

Rae let their head tip back until it bumped gently against the edge of the stage. Above them, the faded banner fluttered a little when the heater finally coughed itself back on, sending a faint breath of warm air down over the circle.

“Okay,” they said, exhaling. “Maybe the joke was better than we thought.”

Rae tracked the movement of the banner with their eyes, then dropped their gaze back to the small circle on the floor. Cables, cases, cup, boots, knees. Jennifer’s hands loose now on her thighs, fingers relaxed but still, as if they were waiting for something that had not yet been asked.

The question had been pacing in the back of Rae’s skull all night, wearing a groove from ear to ear. They heard it in every small reference she made—to Advent colors, to the Sermon on the Mount, to wrong-season kids the church forgot to count. They heard it in the way Mo kept not quite finishing sentences that began with “at synagogue we…” and then stopped, unsure if they were allowed to say the word.
Finally Rae gave up on waiting for a better moment. There was not going to be one. The hall was only getting quieter; the night outside only getting colder. If they did not say it now, they would hear themselves not saying it for the next ten years.

“Can I ask you something kind of rude?” Rae said.

All eyes went to them. Even Jennifer’s.

Rae immediately regretted the phrasing, but it was too late to take it back. They shoved their hands under their knees, pinning them in place, as if that would keep the rest of the words from running away.

“You can try,” Jennifer said. There was no edge to it. Just an invitation.

Rae swallowed. “Are you… actually a Christian?”

The question hung there, suddenly larger than the circle itself. It seemed to rise up and press against the high ceiling, where water stains bloomed around the old light fixtures like continents on a faded map.

Mo’s knee stopped bouncing. Dante’s fingers tightened on the edge of the stompbox until his knuckles showed pale. Lena’s hand on the bass case went still, the little back-and-forth rocking ceasing midswing.

Jennifer did not flinch. She did not look wounded, or pleased, or affronted; she just nodded once, as if Rae had correctly guessed her hometown.

“Yes, I am.”

No trumpet blast. No choir, no organ, no crackling thunder. Just three syllables, spoken with the same even steadiness as everything else she’d said tonight.

Rae’s shoulders drew up almost imperceptibly, as if they had braced for a blow and forgotten to unclench the muscles when it did not land. The word itself seemed to crawl a little across their skin, all youth-group memories and CCM cassette covers and the smell of folding chairs and cheap grape juice.

“Like… church Christian?” Mo said carefully. “Sunday services, sit-stand-sit-stand, find-the-page-in-the-hymnal Christian?”

“Once.” Her pause lingered, the air held around her.

“I’m not very good at the institutional part,” she went on. “I believe in Jesus. I believe in the Sermon on the Mount. I believe we’re meant to feed the hungry and house the needy, sit with the sick and lonely and frightened until morning if that’s what they need.” Her voice didn’t lift into quotation marks when she said it. It stayed matter-of-fact. “I believe we’re supposed to forgive debts. I believe we’re supposed to say no when empire wants our hands for war. I believe strangers are supposed to stop being strangers at kitchen tables.”

She said it like she was describing the load-in from earlier: this is where the amps go, this is how many trips up the stairs, this is who holds the door.

“I’m less convinced,” Jennifer added, “that God keeps attendance.”

The corner of Dante’s mouth twitched at that, despite himself.
“So you…” Rae started, then stopped. “That’s it? No… I don’t know. Creeds? Doctrines? Weird long words printed on the back of the bulletin?”

“Oh, I like some of the long words,” she said mildly. “Mercy. Justice. Forgiveness. Those are good ones. But I don’t think God needs me to pass a vocabulary test.”

Her gaze moved to the scuffed floorboards for a moment, following a scratch that ran between them like a little river.

“I grew up with plenty of doctrine,” she said. “It didn’t do what it was supposed to do for the kids who needed help the most. So I pared it down.”

“Pared it down to… feed people,” Dante said, picking out the words slowly, “and don’t help empires.”

“And don’t hoard,” she said. “And don’t put a lock on the door if there’s someone cold outside. And when somebody owes you and can’t pay, you let it go. And you don’t pretend God hates the people you’re scared of. That about covers it, for me.”

Rae’s fingers dug into the denim over their kneecaps. The muscles along their jaw stood out.

“That’s not what we got,” they said. “We got ‘hate the sin, love the sinner,’ which is like saying ‘hate the blood, love the vein.’”

“I know,” Jennifer said quietly.

Rae’s shoulders climbed another half inch, the movement almost involuntary. They kept their eyes fixed on a knot in the wood between them. “We got ‘pray the gay away’ and ‘God made Adam and Eve’ and ‘if you feel this way it’s because Satan’s testing you.’ We got ‘we’ll help you change’ and then when you didn’t change fast enough you got… uninvited.” Their voice thinned on the last word.

Dante looked sideways at them, the old fury surfacing in his eyes. He’d been there for some of it. He knew how those youth leaders smiled while they turned the knife.

Lena’s hand left the bass case long enough to rest briefly against Rae’s ankle. It was the kind of touch that did not look like anything much from the outside, but Rae felt it like a rope thrown across a gap.

Jennifer folded her hands loosely in her lap. “I know,” she said again. “I’ve watched those churches and I’ve listened to the kids they hurt.”

Rae’s laugh was short and flat. “And you still sign up for the same club?”

“I don’t think of it as a club,” she said. “Clubs have membership cards. I don’t have one of those. I have a handful of stories and a few sentences I try to live by.”

Mo, who had been quiet, cleared their throat.

“My family’s Jewish,” they said. “We did Hebrew school and seders and all that. We were the only ones on our block who didn’t do Christmas lights. So Christians were…” they wobbled a hand. “You know. Atmosphere. Background radiation. Songs in grocery stores. The people who built the malls.”

They smiled, a little apologetically.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” they admitted. “You don’t sound like the Christians my grandparents warned me about, but you also don’t sound like the ones who would’ve invited us over for kugel.”

“I would’ve invited you over for whatever we had,” she said. “It probably wouldn’t have been kugel unless someone taught me. But I would’ve fed you.”

Mo’s mouth twisted in something like a grin. “See, that’s what I mean. You talk like my great-aunt Rivka and my rabbi’s favorite commentary had a baby.”

“That sounds like a handsome baby,” Jennifer said.

Mo snorted. Some of the tightness left their shoulders.

Lena drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “My grandma prays for all of us,” she said. “At Thanksgiving she does this thing where she goes around the table and lays a hand on each person’s shoulder and says a little thank-you to God for them. It’s sweet, you know? Comforting. But if I told her I’m bi, I think she’d just… stop talking.”

Rae looked over, surprised. Lena rarely said the word out loud.

“She’d keep praying,” Lena went on. “She’d put my name first on the list, probably. But it’d be like I got moved into the ‘fix’ category. Like I’d turned into a problem in her head instead of a person she knows.”

“That’s a lonely place to live,” Jennifer aid. “In someone else’s ‘fix’ drawer.”

Lena huffed a laugh that sounded a little too much like a sigh. “Yeah. No kidding.”

Jennifer’s gaze took them all in again, one by one. Rae’s hunched shoulders. Mo’s folded arms. Lena’s knees tucked tight. Dante’s jaw working as he ground his teeth silently, fighting off ten years of arguments with youth pastors and street preachers.

“If the word ‘God’ hurts your mouth or your heart,” she said, “you don’t have to use it.”

The sentence landed with surprising gentleness. It did not feel like permission so much as acknowledgement, like someone saying, yes, that stove is hot, you don’t have to keep touching it to prove anything.

Rae blinked, startled. “You’re not… going to tell us that means the devil wins?”

“I’m not keeping score,” she said. “And I don’t think God is either. I think if a word has been used as a weapon against you, you’re allowed to set it down for as long as you need.” Jennifer tipped her head slightly. “If I say ‘God’ it’s because I need that word for myself some days. It’s not a bill I’m handing you.”

Dante frowned thoughtfully. “Then why keep it at all?” he asked. “Why not just say ‘justice’ and ‘mutual aid’ and ‘solidarity’ and call it a day?”

“I do say those,” Jennifer said. “A lot. They’re good words.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, as if weighing something invisible between them. “But when I say ‘God,’ what I mean is… the reason I’m not allowed to give up on any of this, even when it feels ridiculous. The reason I still believe hungry people should be fed, even when there’s no political advantage in it. The reason I don’t get to write off the people who hurt you as unredeemable.”

She gave a tiny, self-conscious shrug.

“That word anchors me,” she said. “I don’t need it to anchor you. If ‘solidarity’ does that job for you, then that’s your word. I won’t try to take it away.”

Mo watched her, brow furrowed. “You’re not trying to… sell us on anything,” they said slowly. “That’s what’s freaking me out.”

“Would it help if I passed around pledge cards?” Jennifer asked dryly.

Rae barked a laugh in spite of themself. “Depends,” they said. “Is there a free T-shirt?”

“Only if you come to six consecutive Wednesday night potlucks,” she said. “And even then, it’d probably have a potato salad stain.”

“Very on-brand,” Dante muttered.

Jennifer’s smile tilted. “I’m not recruiting,” she said more softly. “I’ve spent enough years watching churches recruit kids for things that had nothing to do with the gospel I read. I’m not interested in being another doorway you have to walk through to be safe or loved. I’m just telling you why I still use the word I use.”

Rae leaned back against the stage again, staring up at the rafters. The knot in their stomach had not disappeared, exactly, but it had loosened enough that they felt they could breathe around it.

“So what is church for you, then?” they asked. “If it’s not… this building. Or any building.”

Jennifer followed their gaze upward, taking in the water stains, the cobwebs in the corners, the banner with its peeling marker letters.

“Sometimes it’s a room like this,” she said. “When it’s full of kids and noise. Sometimes it’s a back porch at midnight with one person who can’t sleep. Sometimes it’s a kitchen table with soup and bread and someone who hasn’t been touched kindly in a long time. Sometimes it’s a hospital ward where the nurses roll their eyes at me for singing lullabies off-key.”

She looked back down at them, at the coiled cables and the empty plastic cups and the four young faces watching her.

“Tonight,” she said, “it’s four wrong-season kids in a church hall that smells like coffee and dust, talking honestly on a wooden floor. That’s as much church as I ever need it to be.”

Mo’s eyes went shiny at the edges. They looked away quickly, pretending to study a nick in their drumstick.

“My rabbi says God shows up where ten people are praying,” they said roughly. “You’re telling me it might be where four people are arguing about setlists.”

“It might,” she said. “Or where one person remembers another’s pain and doesn’t turn it into a sermon. Or where somebody admits they don’t know what to do with love that doesn’t fit their doctrine and tries to learn anyway.”

Lena’s voice came out small and skeptical. “You really think God’s in… this?” she asked, gesturing vaguely at the cables, the empty stage, the half-drunk coffee.

“I think if God’s anywhere,” Jennifer said, “He, She, They are not too proud to sit on the floor with us.” She nudged the styrofoam cup with her knuckles. “These are the rooms I know how to find Him in. The big marble ones never made much sense to me.”

Rae stared at her for a long moment. The words should have slid off them. They had spent years building up scar tissue against this kind of talk. But the way she said it—without demand, without threat, without that thin, reedy note of desperation they’d heard in so many altar calls—made it hard to file under the usual headings.

“So if we walk out of here tonight,” Rae said slowly, “and never touch a Bible again, never say ‘God’ again, you’re… what? Fine with that?”

She held their gaze. “I’ll be sad for the hurt that made that necessary,” she said. “But I won’t chase you down the street with a tract. I’ll just hope you find words, or music, or people who give you what you need to stay alive. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for everyone I sing to.”

Dante let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It came out sounding almost like a laugh.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s… that’s new.”

“Yeah,” Mo murmured. “If my childhood had had you instead of Pastor Mike and the Christmas mall choir, I might not have written so many songs about wanting to burn down nativity scenes.”

“There’s still time,” Jennifer said mildly. “You can always write songs for other reasons.”

Rae smiled, startled and genuine. The word “Christian” still tasted odd in their mouth, metallic and dense with bad memories. But for the first time in years, it did not feel like a loaded gun aimed in their direction.

They weren’t ready to pick it up. They weren’t sure they ever would be.

But they could, at least, sit in the same circle with it on the floor between them and not run for the door.

It was Rae who pulled them back to the river.

They’d been sitting in the politics for a while now—Gulf sand and refugee camps layered over Minneapolis asphalt and the dark ribbon of water outside—until all the words about empire and refusal started to feel too big for the small circle on the floor.

Rae rested their chin on their knees and stared at a loop of cable, thinking of the kids who weren’t in this room. The ones who never made it as far as the door. The ones who ghosted in for half a set and slipped out again before the lights came up.

“You know what sucks?” they said finally. “Half the kids we keep talking about can’t get to shows.”

Mo glanced over. “Yeah,” they said slowly. “That does, in fact, suck.”

“I mean it,” Rae said. “The ones hiding from their parents. The ones whose wheelchairs don’t fit on the bus because the driver can’t be bothered to deploy the ramp. The ones stuck babysitting younger siblings every night. The ones with chronic stuff who can’t stand for three bands in a row without passing out. They hear about shows after the fact. They get told they ‘should’ve been there.’ Like that helps.”

Lena’s mouth tightened. She thought of her cousin in St. Cloud, who taped setlists to her bedroom wall that she’d never hear played live. Of a boy in Duluth who wrote them a letter in careful block handwriting about listening to punk radio under his covers with the volume turned down to a whisper.

“The whole scene runs on ‘you had to be there,’” Rae went on. “And if you couldn’t, because life’s got you by the throat? Well, too bad. Guess you don’t count.”

Their voice had taken on that brittle edge again. Mo’s fingers tightened around the drumstick.

There was a stretch of silence where they all saw the same faces in their heads: kids on pay phones, kids watching for headlights outside their windows instead of sleeping, kids studying bus timetables like escape maps.

Mo cleared their throat.

“So,” they said, and the word came out like it had splinters. “We haven’t recorded yet.”

Jennifer looked over at them, head tilting a fraction. The admission seemed to carry more freight than the sentence itself suggested.

“People keep telling us to,” Mo went on. “To, like, get a demo out. Send tapes to the college stations. Trade with bands in other cities. We keep… not.”

They rolled the drumstick back and forth between their palms, the wood squeaking faintly against callused skin.

“Because of you, honestly,” they added, almost apologetically.

Rae winced. “Subtle,” they muttered.

Jennifer blinked, surprised. Of all the reasons she’d imagined for a band to leave their songs wandering the walls of halls like this with no plastic to contain them, she had not expected to be one of them.

“Because of me,” she repeated softly. There was no accusation in it, just a kind of baffled curiosity, tinged with something like alarm.

Dante jumped in, feeling the need to translate before the fragile, admiring thing in Mo’s voice turned into something heavier.

“What they mean is,” he said, “your… whole deal. About not recording. About keeping songs in the room. Half the zines talk about it like it’s—” he groped for the word and came up with one he half-hated— “holy. And we… read them. A lot.”

“We didn’t want to be the brats who go, ‘Thanks for the example, now we’ll do the opposite,’” Rae said. “So we just… haven’t done anything. Yet.”

Jennifer’s hands, which had been resting loosely on her knees, came together, fingers lacing and unlacing once. Something flickered behind her eyes—touched, yes, but also something more anxious, as if someone had just told her they’d built a house out of her old coat.

“I never meant…” she began, then stopped, choosing the words with care. “I never planned for that to be an example.”

“It kind of is,” Mo said. “The whole ‘she refuses the machine’ thing. Live or nothing. No contracts, no tapes, no bootlegs. You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of who’s, like… a legend with no discography.”

Jennifer made a faint, pained face at the word legend, but let it pass. Her fingers tapped once against her own wrist, an unconscious, grounding rhythm.

“I know what they say,” she murmured. “Some of it’s even true.”

She sat back a little, leaning her shoulders against the base of the stage, eyes drifting upward for a moment as if watching an old reel projected on the stained ceiling.

“In the early fifties,” she said, “a man came to our town from the city. Two men, really. One with a nice suit, one with a nicer smile. They sat at the counter at Eddie’s and bought a round for the room and told everybody how they were going to make us all famous.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “That’s how you knew they were lying. Nobody makes ‘all’ of anybody famous.”

Dante and Rae exchanged a quick, half-grin at that. Lena listened, still and intent.

“They put a microphone on a stand for me,” she went on. “Big shiny thing, looked like something out of a movie. Said all I had to do was sing into it. That they’d take the tape back to the city, work their magic, and then one day I’d hear myself on the radio.”

Her voice had gone distant, not dreamy but remembering every detail.

“I’d never seen equipment like that before,” she said. “All those dials. The reels turning. It felt like standing in front of an x-ray machine. Like something inside me was about to be exposed that I hadn’t agreed to show anyone.”

Mo shifted, suddenly aware of the cables around their own ankles, the familiar weight of mics and amps and monitors. The parallels made them itch.

“I refused,” she said simply. “Kindly but firmly, my folks didn’t raise a pushover. I knew what my songs meant to me. These…gentlemen wouldn’t give me a hearing, I knew that.”

Rae could feel their chest tighten like it did when they watched a horror movie and the character went down into the basement alone.

“A few months later,” Jennifer said, “I was in a diner two counties over, visiting a sick relative. The radio was on. And there I was. Except it wasn’t me anymore.”

Her hands flattened against her knees.

“They’d taken a tape and chopped it up,” she said. “Smoothed it out. Added strings. A chorus. Took my words and tucked them into something that sounded like it belonged on a variety show. They didn’t put my name on it. They didn’t put our town’s name anywhere near it. It was just… product. A nice little inspirational number, sung by a girl with no history.”

She looked at them now, eyes sharp again.

“I felt like someone had pinned a butterfly to a wall,” she said. “They’d taken something that only ever existed between me and the people in that space and turned it into wallpaper. Something they could sell between ads for soap.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. The heater hummed. Somewhere in the pipes, something ticked.

“I kept singing in rooms I could see the corners of. Rooms where, if I made a mistake, it disappeared when the sound died. Rooms where the songs belonged to the air and the people breathing it, not to a company ledger.”

She gave a small, crooked smile.

“Over time,” she added, “people started to talk about that choice like it was… noble. Or mystical. Or a vow. Really, it was panic dressed up as principle. I couldn’t bear the thought of being turned into background music for someone else’s sales pitch ever again.”

Dante let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “So you decided music is only real… in the moment,” he said carefully, echoing something he’d read in a zine quote attributed to her. “When you’re actually playing it, with people in the room.”

She nodded. “That’s what it feels like to me. A song is a bridge between my mouth and your ears for the length of time it takes to sing it. After that, it’s a memory. A good one, if we’re lucky. Tape—” she shook her head slightly “—makes it into a commodity. Something you can own, trade, pirate, quantify. It stops being a bridge and becomes a brick.”

Rae shivered slightly. They’d always liked that line in print. Hearing it from her mouth, seeing the ghost of the old hurt behind it, made it hit differently.

“So yeah,” Mo said quietly. “That’s the story we heard. Or pieces of it. Enough to make us go, ‘Okay, we don’t want that.’”

“We don’t want to get pinned to anybody’s wall,” Rae said. “We don’t want to wake up one day and hear our song selling soda.”

Lena snorted. “We are nowhere near soda money,” she said, but there was no bite to it. It was just fact.

“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Rae shot back. “I’m afraid somebody tapes us at a show and suddenly our voices are someone else’s property. That we become… collectible. Aesthetic. Something people play ironically in ten years at retro nights. ‘Remember Indiana Summer? Remember when they were raw?’”

Jennifer listened, expression softening with each word.

“I am honoured,” she said slowly, “that you heard my stubbornness and read it as integrity. Really. It means you were listening for something besides gossip.”

Mo ducked their head, suddenly shy.

“But listen to me carefully,” she went on, voice steady, cutting through the tangle of cables and anxieties with the same gentleness she’d used earlier on their faith scars. “My superstition is not your scripture.”

The sentence settled over them like a blanket laid deliberately across four sets of knees.

Rae blinked. “What?”

“The thing I’m afraid of,” she said, “the wound I wrapped doctrine around to protect, that’s mine. It doesn’t have to be yours. I met recording machines in the 50s, in a world where men in suits owned your voice the second it touched their microphones. You are meeting them in the present, in basements and back rooms, with borrowed four-tracks and blank cassettes and friends who run their own labels out of backpacks.”

She spread her hands, as if setting the two eras side by side.

“The industry that hurt me is not the same as the one you’re trying to slip past,” she said. “Some of the dangers rhyme. Some don’t. If you make my fear into a commandment, you might protect yourselves from a wound that isn’t coming and walk straight into one that is.”

Mo’s drumstick had stopped moving. They were watching her with wide, intent eyes.

“So you’re saying we should record,” Rae said warily.

“I’m saying you should decide why you are—or aren’t—recording,” she replied. “And be honest with yourselves about the answer.”

Lena tugged absently at a frayed strap on the bass case.

“I worry,” she said, “that if we don’t… certain people will never hear us. The kids we were talking about. The ones at home with the babysitting and the busted wheelchairs and the parents who’d ground them for setting foot in a place like this. The kids in little towns three hours north who don’t even know there is a place like this.”

Rae folded their arms tighter around their legs, but didn’t argue.

“If we put out a tape,” Lena went on, “they could at least… have something. Something to hide in their backpack. Something to play under the covers. Something to tell them they’re not crazy.”

“Tapes are how we got half of our favourite bands,” Mo added. “Dubbed and redubbed until the hiss is louder than the drums. Somebody’s handwriting on the label. ‘Track 3 will change your life.’ Sometimes it did.”

Dante nodded, the political contours already forming in his head.

“Tapes are how mutual aid travels now,” he said. “We pass around addresses and P.O. boxes and lists of safe houses on the same slips of paper as band names. House shows, benefit comps, mixtapes with hotlines printed inside. It’s all the same network.”

He shrugged, a little helpless.

“Feels weird,” he said, “to keep our part of that network… unrecorded. Like we’re showing up to a potluck but never bringing a dish.”

Rae rubbed their forehead, torn.

“I know, I know,” they said. “I just… every time someone says, ‘You should record, you’re wasting your potential,’ I see those suits in your story. Even if they’re actually just some college kid with a four-track and a dream about starting a distro.”

Jennifer’s eyes softened. “Fear of becoming a product is not foolish,” she said. “Especially in a world that tries to turn everything into one. But you also just told me there are kids who will only ever meet you if your voice can travel farther than this hall.”

She reached down and picked up the styrofoam cup again, more for something to do with her hands than anything else.

“I refused recording because, in my time, it was the only way I could see to keep my songs from being weaponized against the people I sang them for,” she said. “The way contracts were written, the way radio worked—if I’d signed, those men would’ve owned not just my voice but the stories of my town. They would’ve been able to sell those stories to people who would never set foot in Geneva, and they’d have done it without giving my neighbours so much as bus fare.”

She looked at each of them in turn.

“You are not talking about that,” she said. “You are talking about cheap cassettes made in someone’s kitchen, sold on sliding scale, mailed to kids whose names you might never know. You’re talking about putting your songs in the hands of people empire would rather leave out of the picture entirely.”

Dante’s eyes were on the floor again, but his mind was racing.

“So what you did,” he said slowly, “was… stop them from turning your music into property that hurt your people. What we might be able to do is… turn our music into a… I don’t know. A care package. A map. Something that helps our people find each other.”

“That sounds about right,” she said.

Rae looked unconvinced, but less defensive.

“I still don’t want to end up with our faces on posters in some record store, filed between bands we hate,” they muttered.

“That’s a question of who you work with,” she said. “And how. A question of contracts, of ownership, of where the money goes and who gets to say yes and no. Those are grown-up questions. Hard ones. I can’t answer them for you.”

She tilted her head, considering.

“But I can give you a rule of thumb,” she said. “A little litmus test for when to be worried.”

They all leaned in a fraction, despite themselves.

“If a company owns more of your song than your friends do,” she said, “that’s where I’d start worrying.”

The sentence sank into them, simple and heavy.

Mo frowned thoughtfully. “Define… owns,” they said.

“Who gets paid,” she said. “Who gets to decide when and where it’s played. Who can tell you ‘no, you can’t use that’ when you want to give it away. Who can sell it to an advertiser without asking you. Who can take it away from you if you walk out of the room.”

She spread her hands, palms up.

“If it’s a kid with a tape deck and a folding table, making a hundred copies at cost so they can send them out with zines and grocery store flyers?” she said. “That’s not ownership in the empire sense. That’s stewardship. That’s helping a song walk a little farther than your shoes can carry it.”

“And if it’s a label that says ‘we own your masters forever and ever amen’?” Dante said.

“Then you’re not feeding wrong-season kids anymore,” she said. “You’re feeding a machine. And it has never been kind to people like you.”

Rae let out a slow breath. The knot in their stomach hadn’t disappeared, but it had shifted shape. It felt less like a wall and more like a fork in the road.

“So you’re… okay,” they said cautiously, “if we… one day… maybe… make a tape.”

“I’m more than okay if you decide to let kids who can’t get to this hall hear what you sound like,” she said. “I’d be sad if my fear stopped you from doing that. I’d be sad if my superstition became your scripture.”

She smiled, small and wry.

“And if you ever do find yourselves in a room with men in suits and shiny microphones,” she added, “you can always ask yourself: do my friends own this song, or does this contract? If it’s the contract, get up and leave. I’ll be very proud of you when you do.”

Lena laughed, the sound shaky but real. “You say that like it’s easy,” she said.

“It won’t be,” Jennifer replied. “But you’ll know in your bones when it’s wrong. Your bodies will tell you. Your shoulders will climb up to your ears. Your stomachs will knot. Your music will feel like a hostage. Trust that.”

Mo nodded, thinking of the way their own muscles had tightened just hearing about the men in Eddie’s bar.

Rae stared at the scuffed floor between them, imagining some future cassette with Indiana Summer scrawled in blue ink on the label. Imagining it in the hand of a kid by a river somewhere they’d never see. Imagining that kid pressing PLAY like they were dialing a number.

“We’ll… talk about it,” Rae said. “Just us, I mean. Not tonight. But.”

“That’s all I’d ask,” Jennifer said. “That you talk about it like grown people who know what their songs are for. Not like kids trying to please a ghost of an old woman who made a decision in a different century.”

Rae glanced up, startled at the word ghost. She smiled faintly, as if at some private joke.

“I’m not your conscience,” she said. “I’m just someone who got pinned once and decided she’d rather stay blurry. You’re allowed to draw yourselves in sharper lines, if that’s what the wrong-season kids need from you.”

The talk of tapes and contracts left a different kind of quiet behind it. Not the stunned kind, not the brittle kind, but the sort that settles after you’ve rearranged a piece of furniture and are trying to decide if it feels right there.

Rae stretched their legs out, then folded them back up again, restless. They could feel something gnawing at the edges of their ribs, the way it did when a song wasn’t finished yet and the missing verse paced back and forth inside them.

The way Jennifer had spoken about contracts, about trusting the knot in your stomach, had brushed against a much older knot in theirs.

“I keep thinking about the Bible camp,” Rae said suddenly.

The others glanced at them. Dante’s brow furrowed; Mo shifted, sitting up a little straighter. Lena’s hand found the handle of the bass case again, thumb running along the worn plastic.

“You don’t have to—” Mo started, but Rae shook their head.

“No, I do,” they said. “Otherwise it’s just… vague. ‘Church hurt me.’ It sounds like an excuse. It’s more specific than that.”

They leaned back against the stage, the wood cold through their shirt, and stared up at the rafters as if the story might be written there.

“I was fifteen when they outed me,” Rae said. “Maybe sixteen. Depends whether you count when they put the pieces together or when they decided to say it out loud.”

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Nobody moved.

“Youth group was… everything for a while,” Rae went on. “We didn’t have much else in our town. No all-ages venues, no queer community center, nothing. If you wanted people to sit in a circle with you and sing and talk about big questions, church was where you went. So I went.”

Jennifer’s hands rested lightly on her knees. Her face had a listening stillness, as if she’d folded herself into the story’s audience without adding any weight to it.

“I had this crush,” Rae said, wincing a little at the admission. “On a girl in our group. Sweet, ridiculous, made friendship bracelets for everyone and underlined verses in her Bible with pink highlighter. I never told her. I never touched her. I just… looked at her hands when we were singing and tried not to die.”

A faint smile flickered across their face and vanished.

“I wrote about it,” they said. “In my notebook. Dumb, teenage, melodramatic stuff. ‘God, why did you make me like this?’ ‘Please fix me, but if you can’t, could you at least not let her notice?’”

They laughed once, harshly. “I thought prayer journals were private. That’s what they told us. ‘Write your heart out, God can take it, we won’t read it.’”

Mo’s fingers tightened around the drumstick until their knuckles whitened.

“One of the leaders found it,” Rae said. “It fell out of my bag when I went to the bathroom, I think. When I came back, he was holding it.”

The room seemed to contract, just for a heartbeat. Even the heater’s hum faded to the edge of hearing.

“He didn’t yell,” Rae said. “That was the weird part. He smiled. He said, ‘Hey, I think we should talk about this, okay? God loves you too much to let you stay confused.’”

Their own voice had lost some of its usual jagged humor. It sounded like they were listening to themselves from a distance, narrating someone else’s life.

“They called a special small group,” Rae went on. “Just me, him, the other leaders, and a couple kids they’d decided were ‘mature believers.’ We sat in a circle. They passed my notebook around like it was a prayer request. They read lines out loud. They asked me when I first started ‘struggling with same-sex attraction.’ They used those exact words. Like it was a hobby I’d picked up from TV.”

Lena’s jaw tightened. Dante had gone very still.

“Then they told me,” Rae said, “that God loved me, but hated my sin. That if I didn’t change, if I kept ‘following this lifestyle,’ I was choosing hell. They said they could help me. They had a program. Special counseling. Accountability partners.” Their lip curled around the last phrase. “They said they’d keep it confidential.”

“And did they?” Dante asked softly, even though he already knew the answer.

Rae shook their head, laughed without humor.

“The next youth group night,” they said, “everyone knew. You could feel it when you walked in. The way people moved their bodies. The way conversations stopped when I got close. The way the worship leader wouldn’t look at me when she talked about ‘sexual sin.’”

Their hands had crept up to their elbows, fingers digging into their own sleeves.

“One of my friends—my best friend—wouldn’t sit next to me anymore,” they said. “She said she needed to set ‘healthy boundaries.’ She’d heard that in a sermon. ‘Healthy boundaries.’ It meant I couldn’t hug her. Couldn’t come over to her house when her parents weren’t home. Couldn’t sleep over. Couldn’t change in the same room during retreat. She didn’t want to ‘give the devil a foothold.’”

The words came out flat, quoted.

“They prayed for me,” Rae said. “They laid hands on me and begged God to ‘heal’ me. To take away ‘the spirit of homosexuality.’ I cried. They thought it meant it was working. Really, I was just… exhausted. Embarrassed. Angry. Ashamed. All of it.”

They swallowed.

“After a while, I stopped going,” they said. “They called. They came by the house. They told my parents. We fought. I said if God loved me like they said, He could do it from somewhere else. I haven’t been to a church service since.”

Silence settled heavy around the circle. The hall seemed to lean in, every scuff on the floor suddenly too clear.

Jennifer had not moved while Rae spoke. Her hands were still, her face open, her eyes dark and steady. There was no flicker of defensiveness, no instinctive rush to explain away or mitigate. When Rae’s voice finally trailed off, she let a few breaths pass before she said anything at all.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

The words were simple, but they carried weight. Not the weight of institutional apology—no ‘on behalf of’—just one person looking at another’s wound and refusing to look away.

“They turned you into a problem to be solved,” she went on quietly. “They took your heart, which you were trying to offer honestly, and treated it like a case file. A project. They used God as a threat. They did that to you in His name. In my faith’s name. I won’t pretend it was anything else.”

Rae stared at her, breathing a little too fast. Their knuckles were white where their hands gripped their sleeves.

“You’re not going to say they meant well?” they asked. “Or that they were confused? Or that it was a ‘different time’ even though it was like, eight years ago?”

“No,” she said. “I think they were wrong. I think they hurt you. I think they were more afraid of their own fear than they were devoted to Christ. And I think they loved their idea of what you should be more than they loved who you actually were.”

It was more condemnation, Rae realized, than any pastor had ever aimed at their fellow Christians. And yet it didn’t feel like gossip. It felt like naming.

“A lot of churches are places of exile For kids who don’t fit in other ways, too, but especially for queer kids. They were built to welcome, and instead they’ve become border checkpoints. People stand at the doors and stamp passports. You get in if you look like the brochure. You don’t if you don’t.”

Mo’s throat worked. They were thinking of their own brush with youth groups, of the way their parents had insisted they could go “as long as you remember who you are,” and how quickly they’d felt the tug to belong, to sing, to blend.

“My faith survives in spite of those structures,” Jennifer said. “Not because of them. If anything, they’ve spent most of my life trying to kill it.”

She glanced briefly at the crooked banner, then back.

“I found Christ in kitchens and cornfields and back porches, not in youth group games or altar calls,” she said. “I found Him in the faces of kids who were told to leave. That’s the only reason I still use His name. If I’d only ever met Him in rooms like the one you just described, I’d have walked away and not looked back.”

Dante shifted, fingers worrying at a loose thread on his sleeve.

“So what do you do with… them?” he asked. “The churches. The pastors. The whole apparatus. Do you just… write them off? Or do you still think they can be… I don’t know. salvaged.”

There was that suspicious note back in his voice, the one that surfaced whenever he smelled spin.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Some of them might be able to repent and change, truly. I’ve seen a few try. But it is not your job to wait around and find out. If the church hurts you, I expect you to walk away from it. I will not chase you back in with promises that ‘this time it will be different.’”

She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again, careful, as if making sure her words were settled before she continued.

“When I was younger,” she said, “I thought maybe my job was to fix those churches. To talk sense into the pastors. To stand up in the middle of services and say, ‘This is not the gospel.’”

A small, humourless smile touched her mouth.

“I tried,” she said. “I wore myself out. I watched them nod and smile and then go back to their ‘healthy boundaries’ and ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ as soon as my back was turned. Eventually I realized my time and my voice were better spent with the kids in exile than with the people who demanded, who created that.”

She looked back at Rae.

“I won’t defend that youth group,” she said. “I won’t tell you they were misguided angels. They were jailers in choir robes. You got out. I’m glad you did.”

Something loosened in Rae’s chest at the word jailers. It fit, horribly well. It meant they hadn’t been imagining it, hadn’t been oversensitive, hadn’t taken a harmless thing and made it monstrous in their own mind. It had been monstrous to begin with.

Dante let out a small breath through his nose.

“You keep talking like that,” he said, “and I’m going to run out of objections.”

A faint, crooked grin flickered across his face, but his eyes were still wary.

“Here’s the one I’ve got left,” he added. “Honest question. Is all this—” he gestured vaguely to the air around her, to her coat, her gentle voice, the tiny revolution she was staging on a church floor “—just… a nicer marketing department for the same old God?”

The question came out sharper than he perhaps intended, but he didn’t retract it. They’d all met the nice Christians before, the ones who smiled more gently while telling you the same old threats. He needed to know if she was one of them.

Jennifer’s fingers stilled. She looked at him, really looked, as if weighing how much hurt was wrapped around that suspicion.

“I don’t market,” she said, after a beat. “Not for God. Not for anybody.”

The flat, simple refusal surprised him.

She drew in a slow breath, let it out.

“I just try to live like the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t a metaphor,” she said.

The words fell into the circle, unadorned.

“Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty. Welcome the stranger. Visit the sick and the imprisoned. Turn the other cheek when someone hits you—and then ask yourself why they felt allowed to hit you in the first place. Refuse to worship wealth. Refuse to confuse Caesar with God. That’s it. That’s the script, as far as I can see. Everything else is stage directions people added later.”

“And if we never follow that script?” Dante asked. “If we say, ‘Cool story, but I’m good,’ and go write our own?”

She shrugged, a small, tired gesture.

“Then you write your own,” she said. “I think the world needs all the honest scripts it can get. I’m not in charge of casting. I’m just trying not to flub my own lines.”

Mo stared at her for a moment, then shook their head in faint disbelief. “You really don’t want us to come back to church, do you?” they said. “Not your church, not any church.”

“I want you to be safe,” she said. “I want you to be loved in ways that make you more yourself, not less. If a church can manage that without conditions, then you can sit in their pews if you feel like it. If they can’t, then I’d rather see you playing loud songs in basements than sitting quietly in a room that calls you cursed.”

Rae’s throat tightened.

“You’re not… scared,” they said slowly, “that if we walk away, if we never come back, that… I don’t know. We’ll go to hell?” The word felt foolish in their mouth, like a relic from a language they no longer spoke, but the fear behind it was not entirely gone.

She shook her head.

“I’ve seen enough hell on this side of the grave,” she said, “created by people waving Bibles around, to know that God’s not in the business of punishing kids for walking away from harm. If you ran out of a burning building, would you expect the architect to scold you for not using the front door?”

Rae had to laugh at that, a startled, choked sound that half-broke into something else. “Depends,” they said. “On whether the architect is a Calvinist.”

“Fair point,” she said, mouth quirking.

The tension in the circle eased, just a little. Dante’s shoulders dropped from around his ears. Mo’s grip on the drumstick loosened. Lena let her forehead rest briefly on her knees, the muscles in her neck softening.

Jennifer looked at Rae again, and this time there was no buffer of abstract theology or politics between them. Just one queer person who had survived their own set of religious storms, looking at another who was still wringing out their clothes.

“I don’t need you to trust God,” she said. “I don’t even need you to say His name. I know what His name has done to you. If all you ever carry from me is the knowledge that one stubborn, praying, queer old woman looked at you and did not flinch, that’s enough.”

Rae held her gaze longer than they had all night. There was still wariness there, still old ghosts shifting behind their eyes, but something else too. A thin, tentative line reaching out, testing the weight of her words.

“Okay,” they said at last, voice low. “I still don’t trust God.”

“Fair,” she said.

“But…” Rae swallowed, surprised by the next words even as they came out of their own mouth. “I think I might trust you.”

The corners of her eyes crinkled. She didn’t make it big, didn’t beam or clasp her hands or say praise God. She just nodded once, like they’d agreed on something practical, like which end of the hall to stack the chairs.

“That,” she said, “is more than enough for tonight.”

The word trust sat in the middle of the circle for a minute, a small, unexpected thing, like a coin someone had dropped and forgotten.

Rae seemed a little bewildered by having said it. They scrubbed their hands over their face, as if to hide from their own mouth, then went back to hugging their knees.

Lena, who had been listening more than talking, felt a different kind of question pressing up from underneath everything they’d discussed so far. Faith, empire, tapes—fine. All of it important. But there was a more basic calculus that ran under her days like a second bloodstream, and it hadn’t been named yet.

“How do you eat?” she asked.

The bluntness of it made everyone else start. Mo blinked. Dante turned his head to look at her. Rae gave an involuntary half-laugh, the way you do when someone says the quiet part out loud.

Lena didn’t flinch. “I mean it,” she said. “You don’t record. You don’t tour with contracts. You give away half your time for free. How do you pay rent? Or whatever you have instead. How do you keep the lights on and the heat going and food in your cupboard?”

Jennifer looked momentarily taken aback, not by the question itself but by the fact that someone had finally voiced it. Then she nodded, as if to say: yes, this is where all those big words land, in the kitchen.

“That,” she said, “is a very reasonable question.”

She drew in a breath, let it out slowly, and settled her back more firmly against the stage.

“The short answer,” she said, “is: with help. From God, from neighbours, from my own hands. In that order on good days; sometimes the order gets jumbled.”

Lena waited. She’d grown up with a dad who worked double shifts at a hardware store and still came home counting coins in his palm; she had a fine-tuned ear for when people substituted poetry for numbers. Jennifer didn’t seem to be doing that. She seemed to be winding her way toward something specific, like someone mentally walking through rooms in her house.

“My grandparents taught me how to mend things,” she began. “Not just spiritually. Literally. Half the town seemed to come through our kitchen at some point. Money was… theoretical, most days. What we had was our hands.”

She held her own up for a second, palms outward, as if showing them off.

“My grandfather worked with tools,” she said. “He could fix anything that held still long enough—tractors, radios, shoes. My grandmother could stretch a pot of soup until a whole youth choir from three counties over could eat and still have leftovers.”
Lena nodded slowly. Those sounded like things her own grandmother might have said, in different words.

“I carry that with me,” Jennifer said. “I fix what I can. I do without more often than I need to. And when I have extra—time, food, a spare guitar—I give it away.”

“That’s… philosophy,” Lena said. “How does it look at the bank?”

Jennifer laughed softly. “There’s no bank involved,” she said. “Not in the way you mean. I’ve never had much of a savings account. Not because I think poverty is holy, but because there was always someone closer to the edge than I was.”

She lifted one shoulder in a small shrug.

“I patch things together,” she said. “I mend instruments. Fiddle with tuning pegs that slip. Change strings for kids who don’t know how yet. Solder crackling cables. I learned a lot of that in hardware stores, watching men who assumed I was just there to buy nails.”

Mo’s ears pricked at that. “You fix other people’s gear?” they asked.

“When they let me,” she said. “I don’t charge. Sometimes they press crumpled bills into my hand anyway. Sometimes they cook me dinner. Sometimes they don’t have anything at all, and then I just figure God’s keeping track somewhere else.”

“And the playing,” Dante said. “You mentioned orphanages. Migrant camps.”

She nodded, face softening as if she were seeing those rooms.

“It’s an honor when someone asks, ‘Will you come sing for us?’” she said. “So I go. Hospitals, especially children’s wards. Orphanages. Shelters. Migrant hostels. Little churches in the middle of nowhere that can’t afford a choir but want music at Christmas. I pack a bag, I get on a bus, I show up.”

“You do it for free?” Lena asked.

“Of course,” she said. “I don’t send invoices. I don’t sign contracts. I don’t measure the work that way. But those places have their own economies. They feed me. They find someone with a spare room where I can sleep a night or two. A nun will slip me a grocery card. A nurse will pass the hat among the staff. A grandmother will put two jars of preserved peaches in my bag and refuse to take them back. I come home with full hands more often than empty.”

Mo smiled faintly at the image of Jennifer leaving a hospital with peaches in her guitar case.

“And when I’m home,” she went on, “I do whatever needs doing. I clean houses. I read letters for people whose eyes are going. I sit with the dying who don’t want to be alone. I look after babies so their mothers can work a shift. I help in community gardens. And yes, sometimes I still play in taverns, when they’ll have me. A couple of places in Geneva, a place or two down the road. They pay in small bills and free meals. It adds up just enough to keep me fed and housed.”

She looked at Lena with level eyes.

“It’s never been comfortable,” she said. “But it has been enough. I know what ‘enough’ feels like. I visit ‘enough’ regularly. I’ve owned very little that I didn’t think I could give away if someone needed it more.”

Lena thought of her own life—the secondhand couch in the apartment she shared with two other women, the stack of unpaid bills on the kitchen table, the carefully rationed bus passes. She knew what not-enough felt like, intimately. The way it gnawed, the constant mental math.

Dante picked up on that tension.

“Not everyone can choose poverty,” he said quietly.

Jennifer turned to him.

“I know,” she said.

“I mean it,” he went on, leaning forward, forearms on his knees. “Some of us are there whether we like it or not. Disabled kids. Sick kids. Black kids in redlined neighborhoods. Kids whose parents got laid off from the plant and never got back up. They don’t get to decide, ‘I will nobly own very little.’ The world decided for them. And sometimes when people talk about… living simply, they make it sound like a… moral badge. Like the rest of us are failing some purity test because we dream about a day when the rent isn’t terrifying.”

His tone wasn’t combative so much as tight, threaded with experiences he’d seen at close range: friends on food stamps, cousins stuck in low-wage jobs, comrades burned out from activism and still broke.

“I hear you,” she said. “And you’re right to be wary. Poverty isn’t a costume. It isn’t a set of aesthetic choices. It’s a set of teeth. It bites harder on some throats than on others, and it leaves scars that don’t make anybody holy.”

She rubbed her thumb lightly over the knuckles of her other hand, as if smoothing out an old ache.

“When I talk about choosing to have less,” she said, “I’m talking about the places where I did have a choice. I could have signed contracts, taken advances, turned myself into a brand. I could have leveraged what talent I have into a more comfortable life. I turned that down. That’s my choice to own. It doesn’t make me better than a nurse working double shifts or a single mother working three jobs. It just means I said no to a specific kind of money that came with strings attached.”

She held his gaze.

“I’m an able-bodied white woman from a town where people took care of each other,” she said bluntly. “The risks I could afford to take are not the risks everyone can afford. If I get sick, there’s a couch somewhere in Geneva I can sleep on. If I break my wrist and can’t play for a while, there are neighbours who will bring me casseroles. That’s not virtue. That’s privilege dressed up as community. I try to be honest about that.”

Lena exhaled slowly. She hadn’t expected to hear the word privilege from this woman in a borrowed coat. It made something in her ease.

“So you’re not saying we should all… give away everything and live in a shack and feel righteous about it,” Lena said.

“No,” Jennifer said. “I’m saying: don’t let money and comfort become your god. Don’t let them decide what you’re willing to say or who you’re willing to stand with. But also don’t let other people turn your hardship into something they can admire from a safe distance.”

She made a small, dismissive gesture.

“I’ve seen people write about my ‘sacrifices,’” she said. “My ‘austere life.’ As if I were some kind of hermit on a hilltop living on crusts and air for the sake of art. It makes me uncomfortable. I eat. I laugh. I have friends. I’ve never gone hungry on purpose. When I have skipped meals, it’s because the math didn’t work that week, not because I was trying to impress God.”

Mo let out a quiet breath of laughter. “The zines make it sound like you live in a cave and come down only to bless bands,” they said.

“That’s good for their poetry,” she replied. “Not very accurate for my electricity bill.”

Rae rubbed at their eyes, listening.

“I grew up with enough,” they said. “Never extra. Never… luxury. But enough. My parents worked themselves ragged to keep it that way. Whenever I say I don’t care about money, my mom looks at me like she’s about to get her wooden spoon.”

“She’s not wrong to worry,” Jennifer said. “You live in a world that punishes people for not caring enough about money. My grandparents didn’t romanticize being poor. They hated seeing their neighbours go without. They shared because they knew what it felt like, not because they thought suffering was glamorous.”

She glanced down at her scuffed shoes.

“I try very hard not to turn my own choices into a brand,” she said. “I don’t want ‘Jennifer the woman who lives with nothing’ to become something people put on a T-shirt while ignoring the people sleeping in their own alleyways.”

“I’ve seen that,” Dante muttered. “Saints on posters. Martyrs on tote bags. Meanwhile the living people who share their conditions are treated like trash.”

“Exactly,” she said. “If someone looks at me and thinks, ‘Ah, how noble, she has so little,’ I want them to turn their head and look at the guy under the bridge with even less and ask why they don’t feel the same awe for him. If they can’t answer that, then their admiration is… fake. It’s aesthetic. It’s not love.”

Mo stirred. “Still,” they said. “There’s something… freeing… in hearing you say you’ve lived your whole life without chasing security. Like there might be another way to do this besides… get a degree, get a job, shut up about the things that matter.”

“There are lots of ways,” she said. “Some of them look like the straight path. Some don’t. Security is not an evil thing. It’s just not the only good thing. And it doesn’t have to cost you your soul.”

She smiled at Lena, the kind of smile you give someone who has spent their life carefully balancing grocery lists against paychecks.

“If you ever find yourself with more than you need,” she said, “you’ll know what to do with it. I can tell that. You don’t need me to tell you to give some of it away. You’ve already been doing that on nights like this, playing benefits and passing hats and feeding people with your noise. That’s wealth, too. It just doesn’t show up on a ledger.”

Lena felt heat rise to her cheeks. No one had ever called her bass lines wealth before. No one had ever spoken about her scraping, scrambling life as anything but barely making do.

“And if we never have more than we need?” Dante asked.

“Then your job,” she said, “is to survive, and to help other people survive alongside you, and to refuse to believe that your worth is measured by what you own. If you can do those three things, I think you’ve already refused half of what empire wants from you.”

She let her hands rest open on her knees again, palms up.

“I don’t expect you to copy my life,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish some of it on you. I’m just telling you what it looks like from where I am. A patchwork. Some frayed edges. A lot of borrowed thread. Enough warmth to keep the cold from settling in too deep. And always, always, hands outstretched, ready to mend the next thing that breaks.”

Mo tapped the drumstick lightly against their shoe, the sound a small, steady metronome.

“Patchwork,” they said. “I can live with that.”

“Most of us do,” Jennifer replied. “We just don’t always call it by its proper name.”

The talk of patchwork and peaches and patched-up amps left them all a little looser, but also a little frayed. It had been a long day wrapped inside a longer year. Their heads were crowded: with empire and God, with youth group ghosts and cassette futures, with kitchens and cornfields and Gulf sand.

Rae could feel the buzz of it under their skin, like the after-ring of an amp that never quite goes silent. Their ears were full of every kid they’d thought about tonight—the ones by the river, the ones in hospital beds, the ones in small towns with nothing but strip malls and Christian radio. The weight of them sat heavy on their shoulders.

“Here’s the thing,” they said suddenly, voice sharper than they meant it to be. “Sometimes it feels like you had the luxury of staying unrecorded.”

The words came out and hung there, bright and jagged.

Mo’s head snapped toward them. Dante’s brows shot up. Lena’s back straightened, the bass case thunking softly as it shifted position.

Rae didn’t look at any of them. Their eyes were on the floor, on a knot in the boards they’d been staring at all night. Their hands were balled into fists against their shins.

“We’re trying to keep kids alive with these songs,” they went on, the edge in their voice blunted only slightly by the crack of exhaustion at the end of the clause. “Cassettes are cheap. They travel. They get into houses we never will. They get hidden in backpacks and under mattresses. They get played on shitty boom boxes at two in the morning when someone’s thinking about doing something stupid. We’re not… trying to be mysterious. We’re trying not to bury the lifeline.”

As soon as they’d said it, Rae wished they could shove the words back in, phrase them better, gentler. But there they were, loud and bare in the quiet hall.

Silence followed, immediate and complete. The heater hummed on dutifully in the ceiling; somewhere out in the corridor, a vacuum cleaner whined and then cut off. A burst of tired laughter drifted from another room, the echo of volunteers joking as they stacked chairs.

Inside the circle, nobody moved. Even the cables on the floor felt suddenly like tripwires.

Jennifer did not flinch away, did not wrap herself in dignity or fragility. She looked at Rae, head tilted, hands still open on her knees as if she were holding out a bowl to catch what might come next.

“You’re allowed to be angry,” she said, her voice very calm. “At me. Or at what I represent. I’d just like to know which it is.”

Rae swallowed. Their throat felt raw, as if they’d been singing for hours.

“I don’t know,” they admitted. “Both? Neither? It’s not like I… blame you for what the zines turned you into. But when people talk about you like some pure mountain saint who never touched tape, it makes the rest of us feel like… sellouts for even thinking about it.”

Mo, who had been watching the exchange with widening eyes, shifted their weight.

“It’s not theoretical,” they said, quieter. “My friend Jo—she’s the one I mentioned earlier, with the home care being cut? She lives for tapes. Literally. She can’t stand through a set. Her lungs won’t let her. She can’t do crowded rooms, can’t be around smoke. Going out at night wrecks her immune system.”

They turned the drumstick between their fingers, faster now.

“But she’s got this battered tape deck,” Mo went on, “and a box of cassettes she’s collected from house shows she never got to go to. Friends dubbed them, or someone recorded off the soundboard, or they taped a radio broadcast. Those tapes are… everything. They’re how she knows the scene exists. They’re how she knows she’s not some freak alone in a room.”

They looked at Jennifer, eyes steady.

“If no one ever recorded,” Mo said, “she’d have nothing.”

Lena nodded slowly, picking up the thread.

“Same for kids in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “I grew up in a town where the only music you got was what was on the one FM station and whatever tapes your cousins brought back from the city. Neu Punk came to us on dubs. Tangled, hissy, barely-legible liner notes and photocopied lyrics. That’s how I knew there were other people out there angry like me, scared like me, wanting something else.”

She let out a breath.

“Most of the kids writing us letters now?” she said. “They don’t live in Minneapolis. They live two, three hours away. Farm towns. Mining towns. Reservation towns. They can’t get here on a weeknight. Sometimes not on any night. Their parents would never let them. Or they don’t have a car. Or they’re taking care of someone. All they’ve got is whatever fits in a shoebox under the bed.”

Rae listened, jaw tight, hands still locked on their legs.

“I know,” they said. “I do. That’s why we’re even… talking about tapes at all. It’s just…” They struggled for the word. “You know how many times someone’s told me, ‘If you record, you’ll dilute the magic’? As if the only honest punk is the one that disappears after impact. As if no one’s hurting in the dark.”

Dante exhaled through his nose. He understood both sides too well. The myth of the unrecorded show had seduced him as a teenager. So had the hiss of a much-dubbed tape arriving in the mail at just the right time.

“Tapes are how we learned half of what we know,” he said. “They’re how we trade information. Songs, sure, but also addresses, hotlines, names of comrades in other cities. Someone slips a note in with the demo: call this number if you get busted. Talk to this person if you’re stuck. It’s all the same network.”

He ran a hand through his hair, eyes on some distant memory.

“You’re not wrong that there’s a purity to live-only,” he said to Jennifer. “But purity doesn’t keep kids warm. And sometimes it feels like we’re being asked to choose between… keeping the art untainted and actually reaching the people who need it.”

Jennifer listened to the three of them, her expression sober. Her fingers moved once, lightly, against her own knee, as if tracing the seam of some old decision.

“I don’t want to be the stick anyone beats you with,” she said. “If my story has been used that way, I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention. I made a choice for my time, with my wounds. People turned that choice into a myth. They didn’t always ask my permission.”

She sighed, the sound fatigue and affection all at once.

“In my world,” she said, “records were almost always in the hands of men who did not care if the wrong-season kids ever heard them. Records were things you bought in bright stores if you had spare money. Things that played in houses that already had full cupboards. They were, more often than not, decorations for people who were doing fine.”

She shrugged slightly.

“So refusing records felt like refusing to feed the wrong mouths,” she said. “It was my way of saying, ‘These songs belong to the people in this room, not to some executive three states away.’”

Mo nodded, seeing it.

“But you,” she went on, looking from face to face, “are talking about something else. Cassettes made on shoestring budgets, traded hand to hand. Dubs that travel in backpacks and care packages. That’s not the kind of record I refused. That’s more like… passing around extra bread at the end of a meal.”

Her gaze softened.

“Then maybe, for you,” she said, “cassettes are part of the table. Part of how you feed people. That’s not what records were for, in my time.”

The sentence eased something in the air. It didn’t erase Rae’s anger, but it gave it context that didn’t make any of them villains.

Rae drew their knees tighter to their chest, eyes still on the floor.

“I just don’t want someone to look at us in ten years,” they said, “and say we sold the songs out. That we turned something holy into something… consumable.”

“Holiness is not how scarce something is,” Jennifer said. “It’s what it does to the people who touch it.”

She let that sit, then added, “There’s one line of mine that people like to quote when they’re trying to sound righteous. They usually forget the context, but the line’s still true.”

She met Rae’s eyes.

“If you make a profit from a song about hunger,” she said, “you’ve already forgotten why you wrote it.”

The words landed with a soft thud, heavy and precise.

Mo let out a low whistle. “That’s… yeah,” they said. “That’s about it.”

“It’s not a ban on ever taking money,” she clarified. “People have to live. You have to pay for tape decks and gas and the occasional dentist. But if you find yourselves structuring your songs, your shows, your decisions around what makes the most money rather than what feeds the most kids—” she tilted her head “—that’s when the rot sets in.”

“Profits and ownership,” Dante said. “That’s the spine.”

“Yes,” she said. “Who gets rich off your hunger songs? Who gets full? If it’s the people who already have full cupboards, something’s off.”

Lena stared at her hands for a moment, then nodded slowly.

“So the rule isn’t ‘never record,’” she said. “It’s ‘never let your recordings belong more to profit than to the people they’re meant to help.’”

“That’s how I’d put it,” Jennifer said. “Make sure your tapes serve your ethics, not the other way around.”

Rae breathed out, some of the bite leaving their voice.

“I’m still mad at the myth,” they admitted. “The way people talk about you like you’re this perfect ghost of what we should be. It feels… impossible. Like we can’t win.”

“You’re allowed to be mad at the myth,” Jennifer said. “I’m often mad at it myself. It flattens everything. Makes my life sound clean and simple when it was anything but. Makes it easy for people to admire me instead of doing the messy work themselves.”

She gave a small, crooked smile.

“If it helps,” she added, “you can go ahead and tell anyone who tries to use my name as a weapon that I said they’re misusing it. That I never told you not to record. That I told you to take care of the hungry kids first, whatever form that took.”

“That… actually does help,” Rae said, surprised. “A little.”

“And if you put out a tape,” Mo said, “we’ll put that in the liner notes. ‘Blessed by Jennifer, do not use for purity tests.’”

Jennifer laughed, the sound lightening the air.

“I’ll take that benediction,” she said.

Dante leaned back on his hands, looking at each of them in turn. The argument hadn’t solved everything. They still had to have the long, complicated talk in the van, at the kitchen table, in the practice space with a notepad and a calculator and a list of labels who might be trustworthy. But something had shifted.

“Okay,” he said. “We agree on this much: whatever we do—record or not—profits and ownership have to line up with what we actually believe. No labels that treat kids like markets. No deals we can’t walk away from. No songs written to sound good in ads.”

“And tapes go where?” Lena asked.

“Into shoeboxes,” Mo said. “Onto bedside tables. Into care packages. Into Jo’s tape deck.”

“Into the hands of wrong-season kids who can’t fit in this room,” Jennifer added. “Who might need your songs more than the critics do.”

Rae closed their eyes for a moment, picturing that: a tape with their crooked handwriting on the label, clacking into some cheap plastic player in a town they’d never see. The hiss, the drum count, their own voice coming out tinny but present into a dark bedroom where someone lay awake, listening.

“Okay,” they said again, softer. “That, I can live with.”

The flare of anger had burned through and left something else in its wake—not certainty, exactly, but a shared understanding. The purity they were chasing wasn’t about remaining rare and untouched. It was about making sure every choice they made, including putting their songs on tape, was another way of setting a table rather than building a pedestal.

The heat of the flare-up faded, leaving behind that strange, clear air that sometimes comes after a storm—crisp, thin, a little raw.

They all shifted positions again, subtly resetting the circle. Dante stretched his legs and crossed them at the ankles. Lena leaned her back against the stage, bass case now beside her instead of in her lap. Rae unwound their arms and flexed their hands, as if discovering they still had fingers. Mo spun the drumstick slowly, end over end, a metronome ticking down into quiet.

For a while, nobody spoke. The building’s noises filtered back in around them: the faint clatter of dishes from a distant kitchen, somebody’s muffled laughter in the corridor, the drag and thunk of a table being folded and moved. Light from the emergency exit sign washed one corner of the hall in sickly green.

Mo watched Jennifer as she listened to those sounds, her head cocked, eyes half-lidded. For the first time all night, Mo allowed themself to look at her the way the zines did: as this improbable figure who seemed to carry half a century of music and trouble in the small, compact frame of someone’s unassuming aunt.

They turned the drumstick once more between their fingers, then stopped.

“Can I ask you the other thing?” Mo said.

Everyone looked over. Rae’s brows lifted. Dante shifted his weight, curious. Jennifer focused back on Mo, attention sharpening.

“What other thing?” she asked.

Mo twirled the stick once, then tucked it behind their ear, fingers suddenly empty.

“Do you know what people call you?” they said. “In zines? On flyers? In those weird manifestos kids write in the backs of notebooks?”

Jennifer’s mouth quirked. “I’ve heard a few names,” she said. “Some of them fit my skin better than others.”

“‘Secular saint,’” Mo said, counting off on their fingers. “‘Godmother of Neu Punk.’ ‘The Echo of Ohio.’ ‘The woman who won’t be recorded.’ My personal favorite was ‘the patron non-saint of kids who still believe in something but don’t know what to call it.’ That was in a Minneapolis zine, three years ago.”

Rae groaned softly. “Oh God, not that one,” they said. “They used a picture of you that looked like it had been taken from across a parking lot and photocopied fifteen times.”

“It probably had,” Jennifer said. “I don’t pose for many cameras.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Mo said. “You’re this… myth. The woman who keeps saying no to the machine and yes to the kids. People talk about you like you’re half real, half story somebody made up in a basement and then we all agreed to act like she exists.”

Jennifer exhaled, something between a sigh and a laugh.

“I’ve been called worse things than ‘secular saint,’” she said. “In some circles, that’s practically slander.”

“Does it bother you?” Dante asked. “The labels?”

“Some of them make me smile,” she said. “Some make me wonder. ‘Echo of Ohio’ is… poetic. I can live with that one. I am, in many ways, still a twelve-year-old girl walking through cornfields, humming hymns under her breath. ‘Godmother’ I tolerate because people need genealogies. They want to know where their music came from. I just wish they wouldn’t forget all the other women whose names they never learned.”

She picked up the styrofoam cup again, rolling it lightly between her palms.

“‘Secular saint’ is the one that scares me,” she admitted. “Not because I think sainthood is a bad thing, but because it turns me into a statue. And statues are very easy to admire and very easy to ignore.”

Rae tilted their head. “How do you mean?” they asked.

“It lets people point at me and say, ‘Look at her, isn’t she extraordinary,’” Jennifer said, “instead of saying, ‘Look at what she’s doing, maybe I could do a little of that too.’ The language of sainthood takes ordinary practices—feeding hungry people, housing lost ones, teaching children, mending instruments, writing about other people’s songs instead of my own—and wraps them in stained glass. Suddenly they’re not things anyone can do anymore. They’re miracles.”

She set the cup down, fingertips resting lightly on its rim.

“I don’t think it’s miraculous to fix a kid’s broken guitar so they can keep playing,” she said. “I think it’s basic decency. I don’t think it’s heroic to give up a second coat so someone else can have a first. It’s just… what my grandparents taught me. If you put a halo on that, people start thinking, ‘Well, of course I can’t be like her, I’m not a saint.’ And then they go back to their lives unchanged.”

Dante nodded slowly. He’d seen that dynamic in activist circles too—how martyrs were elevated, their sacrifices turned into stories that inspired awe instead of emulation.

“And the writing,” she added. “People make a fuss about the fact that I write more about other musicians than about myself. They call it self-effacing, saintly, whatever the word of the week is. But really, it’s just what made sense. The world didn’t need another article about Jennifer. It needed more kids to know there was a girl in Bologna or a boy in Detroit making songs that might save their lives.”

She shrugged, the movement small and practical.

“If you call that sainthood,” she said, “you let everyone else off the hook. They can keep hoarding attention because, after all, they aren’t saints.”

Mo scratched at the back of their neck, feeling a little guilty on behalf of every breathless zine they’d read.

“Thing is,” Rae said quietly, “the stories… helped.”

Jennifer looked at them.

“When I was in it,” Rae went on. “When I’d just left church and didn’t know what to do with… any of it. My parents thought I was going through a phase. The youth group thought I was demon-possessed or whatever. I thought I was… broken. And then I found this zine at the record store. It had this piece about you playing at some orphanage in Ohio and refusing to let anyone tape you, and walking home coatless in the snow because you’d given your coat away to some kid whose parents had left him there.”

They flushed slightly, aware that they were probably misremembering details, compressing half a dozen stories into one. Myth doing its thing.

“It made me feel… less alone,” they said. “Like there was at least one adult in the world who hadn’t… sold out. Who was still doing weird, stubborn, honest things because of Jesus and not in spite of Him. It didn’t make me want to be you. It just… made me believe someone like you could exist. That mattered.”

They swallowed.

“I’m not saying the zines got you right,” they added. “Clearly they… embroidered. But if they hadn’t, I don’t know if I’d be sitting here. I might have decided the whole faith-adjacent world was rotten and there was nothing redeemable in it at all. Your… myth gave me something to hold onto until I could… call the thing that survived in me something else.”

Jennifer listened, eyes softening, the tension in her shoulders changing shape.

“I’m glad,” she said. “Truly. If the stories kept you breathing long enough to get to a room like this, I’m grateful for them. Grateful for the kids who wrote them down and stapled them together and sent them out into the world.”

She paused, then added, “I don’t want to take that away from you. Or from anyone those stories have held.”

Mo shifted, relieved.

“So you’re not saying burn all the zines,” they said. “Just… read them critically.”

“Something like that,” she replied. “I know how hungry kids are for examples. I was hungry that way too. I had a few of my own—women and men in my town who lived quietly heroic lives. People who gave away more than they kept, who refused to be cruel even when it would have been easier. They didn’t have zines. They barely had photographs. But their stories kept me from despair.”

She rubbed her thumb along the rim of the cup.

“What I’m wary of,” she said, “is the way the stories sometimes stop at admiration. ‘She did this incredible thing,’ full stop. They don’t always follow through to, ‘and here’s how you could do a smaller version in your own town.’”

Dante nodded. “Worship instead of workshop,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said. “It feels safer to put someone on a shelf and light candles to them than to ask, ‘Where in my life could I do what they did, in my size, with my tools?’ Saints are tidy. Ordinary goodness is messy. It asks things of you.”

She looked around the circle again, taking them all in.

“If my stories keep you alive,” she said, voice quieter, “I’m grateful. If they keep you from believing you can do what I did, then we need to throw some of them away.”

Silence followed, but it wasn’t empty. It felt like the moment between an inhale and an exhale.

Rae stared at her, then let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“Can we… keep the coat one?” they asked. “The one where you give away your coat and walk home freezing?”

Jennifer rolled her eyes slightly, but there was affection in it. “That one’s mostly true,” she said. “I had a shawl. It wasn’t quite martyrdom.”

“It’s not the freezing part that stuck with me,” Rae said. “It’s the part where you saw somebody cold and did something about it. Fifteen-year-old me read that and thought, ‘Okay. That’s one way to be a Christian I don’t hate.’”

“That’s a start,” Jennifer said.

“I also like the one about you staying up all night with that kid in the kitchen,” Mo added. “Making tea and talking until morning. That’s less… halo-able. More… blueprint. Like, I can do that. I have a kettle.”

“You do have a very loud kettle,” Dante said.

Mo elbowed him gently.

“I’m all for keeping the kitchen stories,” Jennifer said. “They’re the truest ones. And they come with actual instructions. Put on water. Stay awake. Listen.”

“And the saint stuff?” Dante asked. “The ‘Godmother of Neu Punk’ stuff?”

She smiled wryly.

“You can write your own footnotes under those,” she said. “‘She never called herself that.’ ‘She tripped over her own guitar case at least once a week.’ ‘She forgot song lyrics and made up new ones on the spot.’ Whatever keeps me firmly in the category of ‘fallible human’ instead of ‘magic creature from the hills of Ohio.’”

Rae snorted. “‘Echo of Ohio’ is kind of great, though,” they said. “I’m not giving that one up.”

“I like it too,” she admitted. “It makes me sound… faint. Not the voice, just the echo. That’s about right.”

Lena, who’d been quiet, spoke up.

“I think what we need,” she said slowly, “is stories that tell the truth about what you actually did. Not just the headlines. ‘Secular saint refuses record deal’ is catchy. But ‘woman writes longhand letters to kids in crisis and spends her afternoon fixing a broken guitar in a church basement’ is… more useful.”

“It doesn’t fit on a flyer,” Mo said.

“No,” Lena replied. “But it fits in our lives.”

Jennifer’s eyes shone for a moment with something like pride.

“Then tell those stories,” she said. “About me, about yourselves, about the people you meet. Tell the ones with instructions hidden inside them. ‘Here’s what we did when the heater broke at a benefit show.’ ‘Here’s how we ran a kitchen out of a squat for six months.’ ‘Here’s how we got a wheelchair ramp built for a kid whose landlord didn’t care.’ Those are the ones that make myths into toolkits instead of statues.”

“‘Myths into toolkits,’” Dante repeated. “I’m stealing that.”

“You’d be stealing it back,” she said. “It belongs to your generation more than mine.”

Mo stretched their legs out until their boots bumped the coil of a cable and set it wobbling.

“So we get to… keep you,” they said. “As a story. Just… edit for accuracy.”

“And usefulness,” Jennifer said. “If a detail makes me look impressive but doesn’t help anyone else do anything, you can drop it. If a detail makes me look ordinary but gives someone a new idea for how to love their neighbour, keep it.”

Rae nodded slowly.

“Okay,” they said. “Deal.”

They thought of the zine they’d been doodling layouts for, the one half-finished on the kitchen table back at the apartment. They thought of the half-page they’d left blank, titled only: J.F.S. IN REAL LIFE? They knew now what they wanted to put there.

Not the legend. Not the halo.

Just a small woman in a borrowed coat, sitting on a church hall floor in Minneapolis in 1994, talking about tapes and God and rent and kids in small towns. Someone who seemed deeply allergic to being turned into anything she couldn’t live inside.

Someone who, by refusing sainthood, might actually be the safest kind of saint they’d ever met.

They sat there with her myth laid out between them like a disassembled instrument: body here, neck there, strings coiled separately, nothing mysterious left that you couldn’t, in theory, put your hands on.

“Since we’re editing,” Rae said, “how about you tell us a couple yourself? The little stories. Before we find them secondhand in someone else’s photocopier.”

Jennifer made a face like they’d asked her to read her own diary aloud.

“You already know them,” she said. “Kids have been trading my kitchen gossip like relics for years.”

“Indulge us,” Mo said. “Besides, your versions will have fewer halo effects.”

She sighed, a sound hauled up from somewhere between reluctance and affection.

“Fine,” she said. “Two, and you’re not allowed to turn either into stained glass.”

Mo crossed an imaginary heart. Rae mimed zipping their mouth, then immediately unzipped it again. “No promises,” they murmured, but the grin gave them away.

Jennifer shifted, drawing her knees up a little, arms resting on them.

“The coat,” she said, “since you’re all so attached to it.”

Rae perked up; Dante smirked.

“It was… ’59, maybe,” she said. “Snow like this—” she glanced toward the covered windows “—only deeper. One of those winters when Ohio forgot it wasn’t the Arctic. I’d just played at a little hall not so different from this one. Church basement, fundraiser for something—I don’t even remember what, which should tell you how un-miraculous the evening was.”

She smiled faintly.

“Folks drifted out afterward,” she went on. “I was packing up. There was a girl near the door—sixteen, seventeen. Thin coat, no hat. Waiting for someone who was late or not coming. You know that look people get when they’re trying not to admit they’ve been left?”

Lena nodded; it was a look she recognized from bus stops and parking lots.

“I asked her if she had a ride,” Jennifer said. “She shrugged. Said her uncle was ‘probably on his way.’ Her hands were shaking. I didn’t believe her.”

She glanced at her own sleeves.

“I had two coats at home,” she added. “One for Sunday best, one for everything else. I was wearing the nicer one that night because my grandmother insisted. I took it off and put it on the girl. She protested, of course. Everyone does, the first time someone tries to hand them warmth.”

“What’d you say?” Rae asked.

“‘You’ll bring it back next week,’” Jennifer said. “She didn’t. I didn’t expect her to. I walked home in my sweater and my grandmother scolded me for catching cold, and the next day she gave me her coat without much comment. We didn’t talk about it. Half the town saw that girl wearing it all winter. Nobody made a big fuss.”

She spread her hands, as if to show there was nothing invisible up her sleeves.

“That’s it,” she said. “No choirs of angels. No voice from heaven. Just a cold night and an extra coat.”

“Still a good coat story,” Mo said.

“It’s a coat story,” Jennifer corrected. “I’d be disappointed in all of you if you couldn’t manage the same.”

She let the ghost of a smile fade.

“The kitchen one’s not much different,” she said. “Different kid, different kind of cold.”

She leaned her head back against the stage, eyes on the ceiling as if projecting the memory there.

“House down the street from mine,” she said. “This would have been… late seventies? Eighties? Time blurs. The family had come to my town from somewhere else—bigger city, less forgiving. The youngest kid was… seventeen, eighteen. Quiet. Kept their head down. You could tell they were… not at ease in their own skin yet, but desperate to be.”

Mo’s breath caught; they had known a dozen kids like that.

“One night their mother knocked on my door,” Jennifer went on. “Crying, but trying not to show it. Asked if I could… talk to them. She didn’t have the words for what was happening. She just knew her child was in pain and church had not been kind about it.”

Her fingers curled loosely around the edge of the stage.

“They came over,” she said. “Sat at my kitchen table, arms folded, ready to bolt. I made tea. We talked. Or rather, they talked in short bursts and I listened in long stretches. Sometimes we sat in silence. Sometimes they swore. Sometimes they cried. We drank a lot of tea.”

She smiled, small and fond.

“At some point it got dark,” she said. “Then it got light again. I walked them home when the sun came up. Their mother met us at the door with red eyes and strong coffee. We didn’t fix anything that night. We didn’t pick new pronouns or come up with a grand strategy to make the town less cruel. We just… sat. And I tried very hard not to say anything that made their load heavier.”

“Did it… help?” Lena asked, soft.

“I hope so,” Jennifer said. “They kept coming back. We kept drinking tea. Years later they wrote me from a city where they’d moved, with a new name and a new haircut and a job that didn’t require pretending. They thanked me for not panicking. That was the main thing, they said. ‘You didn’t panic.’”

She shrugged lightly.

“None of that is special,” she said. “It’s what folk do when the world’s doing a bad job at being neighbourly. Or what folk ought to do.”

Rae sat very still, absorbing that. They could picture it: the chipped mugs, the slowly cooling tea, the fluorescent kitchen light turning everything slightly yellow at three in the morning. The absence of panic—how revolutionary that must have felt to a kid who’d only ever seen adults react to them with fear or fury.

“You saying none of that is special,” Dante said, “makes me want to argue with you. But I get what you mean. It’s not… superpowers. It’s… staying put.”

“Yes,” she said. “Staying put when someone’s hurting. That’s most of it.”

The circle settled into that thought for a moment. The heater hummed overhead. Somewhere, a door shut softly. The building was emptying out, but the hall still felt full.

Mo’s fingers found their drumstick again, rolling it back and forth against their palm. They chewed on their lower lip, debating with themselves, then blurted it out before they could stop.

“My younger brother’s sick,” they said.

Three heads turned. Jennifer’s attention snapped gently to them, all softness and focus.

“Mark,” Mo went on. “He’s fifteen. Leukemia. We caught it early, they say, but—” They made a vague, frustrated gesture, words snagging on the edges of fear. “He’s been in and out of the hospital. My parents are… trying. The synagogue’s trying. Everyone’s… bringing casseroles. Saying ‘we’re praying.’”

Their mouth twisted.

“I come to shows like this and I yell about empire and hunger and whatever, and then I go home and look at him and think, ‘What good is any of this if I can’t fix his stupid blood?’”

The drumstick clicked against their knee. “I know that’s not rational,” they added quickly. “I know it’s not… how science works. But the guilt’s there anyway. That I’m here instead of… there. That my activism is just me yelling in rooms while he throws up in plastic buckets.”

Jennifer’s face did something almost imperceptible—some small change around the eyes, the mouth. Recognition. Pain pressed flat by years of practice.

“What does Mark like?” she asked.

Mo blinked. “What?”

“What does he like,” she repeated. “Besides not being sick. Music? Stories? Bad jokes?”

“Uh. Dinosaurs,” Mo said, thrown by the question. “He used to know every dinosaur name. He likes—liked—loud music. Before they told him to stop going to shows because of the germs. He draws. Cartoons. Mostly robots.”

“Do you have any tapes he likes?” she asked. “Or that he might like, now?”

“Some,” Mo said. “He’s got his own little tape player in his room. He listens when he’s not too nauseous.”

Jennifer nodded.

“Here’s what you can do this week,” she said, voice practical. “Make him a mix. Not just of your band. Of everything you think would make him feel less like a patient and more like a kid with extremely cool taste. Put dinosaur doodles on the J-card. Ask the bands you know to record stupid little intros. ‘Hey Mark, this is so-and-so, this song’s for you.’”

Mo stared at her. It was so simple it felt almost insulting—and yet something in their chest eased at the thought.

“That’s…” they said slowly. “That’s actually… doable.”

“Also,” she added, “ask your rabbi if there’s anyone in the community who’s navigated this with a teenager before. People are shy about talking about cancer until someone else speaks first. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are parents and siblings who have already been where you are. They may have tricks. Or at least better jokes.”

Mo’s eyes went shiny, but they nodded, swallowing.

“Okay,” they said. “Yeah. I can… I can do that.”

Dante watched this exchange, something twisting in his own gut.

“My thing feels… selfish compared to that,” he said.

“Pain doesn’t have a hierarchy,” Jennifer said. “It just has different shoes. Tell me anyway.”

He huffed a little, embarrassed, but plunged ahead.

“I talk a lot,” he said. “You might have noticed.”

Rae snorted. “We may have picked up on that, yeah.”

“Shut up,” he muttered, but there was fondness there. He tapped the heel of his boot against the floor. “What I mean is: I do a lot of… talking. Reading theory. Writing manifestos, or at least angry paragraphs in the margins of flyers. I go to meetings. I argue with people about tactics, about nonviolence, about electoral politics versus direct action, all that.”

He rubbed his hands together, as if trying to scrub something off.

“And then I look at my actual life,” he went on. “The hours in the day. And I think, ‘Okay, Dante, how many of those hours were spent doing something that materially improved anyone’s situation? And how many were spent in rooms full of people who already agree with you, nodding and feeling correct?’”

He laughed, short and bitter. “The ratio’s not great,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve turned radicalism into a book club. Like I’ve built an identity out of being the guy who knows which pamphlet to quote, instead of… I don’t know. The guy who actually shows up when someone needs their furniture moved or their court date remembered.”

J ennifer listened intently, nodding along.

“I know some of those guys,” she said softly. “I’ve been some of those guys, at times. It’s an easy trap. There’s a lot of applause available for clever words. Not as much for washing dishes after the protest.”

“So what do I do?” he asked, frustration flaring. “Drop the books? Stop going to meetings? That feels… irresponsible in its own way.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t drop the books. Don’t stop thinking. The world has enough unexamined action already. But maybe… tether your talking to something specific.”

“Meaning?” he said.

“Meaning,” she said, “pick one thing in your actual reach. Not the Gulf. Not the entire welfare state. One thing. A tenants’ union in this neighborhood. A bail fund. A buddy system for queer kids walking home from the river. A phone tree for families in your synagogue or church or whatever you call your mess of friends.”

She gestured lightly.

“Say to yourself, ‘For every hour I spend arguing about theory, I will spend an hour doing something toward that one thing,’” she said. “Not forever. Just for a month. See what happens.”

Dante considered this. It sounded almost… mechanical, which appealed to the part of his brain that liked checklists.

“I could do that,” he said slowly. “I know a tenants’ group that meets two blocks from my place. They’re always short on people to knock doors.”

“Then knock doors,” she said. “Bring your pamphlets if they’re useful. Leave them at home if they’re not. Let the ratio rebalance a little. You’ll notice quickly whether your guilt shrinks. Guilt is not always a bad sign. Sometimes it’s a compass.”

He nodded, something like relief loosening his shoulders.

“Okay,” he said. “I can… try that.”

Lena had been quiet, watching the way Jennifer answered each fear with something small and specific, a stitch instead of a bandage. Her own worry hovered just behind her teeth, obstinate.

“I’m scared of rent,” she said abruptly.

Rae glanced at her; Mo did too. Dante didn’t look surprised.

“Me too,” he said.

She shook her head. “I mean, yes, in the general ‘capitalism is a meat grinder’ way. But also… my cousin.”

Jennifer’s attention shifted.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Her name’s Cassie,” Lena said. “She’s sixteen. Lives with my aunt up in Duluth. Aunt’s working two jobs. Cassie’s… slipping. Skipping school. Hanging out with guys who are too old, too bored. Drinking. Nothing dramatic yet, just… that slow slide where you can see the cliff coming.”

She twisted the hem of her shirt around her fingers.

“My aunt calls me,” she went on. “‘Lena, can you talk to her? You’re the cool cousin, she listens to you.’ I call. I visit when I can. I drag her to shows when she’s in town. But I feel like I’m bailing out a boat with a spoon. And every month, the rent on my place creeps up. They’re talking about raising theirs, too. I’m scared we’re all going to end up… scattered. Cassie couch-surfing in a city that eats girls like her for breakfast. Me back at my parents’ house, pretending I’m not suffocating. I know it’s small compared to empire and war and disease, but…”

She shrugged helplessly, blinking hard.

“It’s not small,” Jennifer said gently. “It’s the exact size of your life. That’s never small.”

She thought for a moment, tapping her fingers lightly against her knee.

“First,” she said, “talk to your friends who know the housing co-ops and the landlords who aren’t devils. There are always a few. Make a list. Not because you can fix rent, but because you can maybe find places where the ground shifts less under your feet. Share that list with your aunt, with Cassie, with any kid you meet who’s wobbling.”

Lena nodded slowly. That was… doable. Mundane, but useful.

“Second,” Jennifer went on, “give Cassie something to do that isn’t just ‘stay out of trouble.’ Trouble is often the only interesting thing available to kids like her. ‘Don’t’ is a poor substitute for ‘do.’”

“She draws,” Lena said immediately. “She’s actually… good.”

“Bring her into your scene,” Jennifer said. “Not just as someone who stands in the back. Does your band need art? Posters? Tape covers? Zine illustrations? Let her do some. Pay her if you can, in money or food or tapes. Make her feel like she’s part of something that isn’t just the boys and the bottle.”

Lena’s chest tightened with relief and fear at once. “I can do that,” she said. “I think.”

“Call her this week,” Jennifer said. “Ask her for a design. Give her a deadline. Structure is a kindness, for kids sliding around like that.”

Lena laughed weakly. “You sound like you’ve seen a lot of Cassies.”

“I’ve seen a lot of everyone,” she said. “We’re not as original as we like to think.”

She glanced around the circle, taking in their faces—Mo’s worried, Dante’s intent, Rae’s raw, Lena’s exhausted.

“You’re carrying a lot,” she said. “More than kids your age ought to have to, if the world were arranged properly. I can’t rearrange it for you tonight. I can only say: you’re allowed to pick up the corner that’s in front of you and trust that someone else is picking up another corner somewhere else.”

Rae huffed a laugh, eyes wet.

“Is that your grand unified theory?” they asked. “Everyone grab a corner?”

“Something like that,” she said. “If enough of us do, the whole thing might shift an inch. Sometimes that inch is the difference between someone falling through the cracks and someone finding a place to stand.”

She smiled then, small but real.

“And in the meantime,” she added, “we make tea, and we fix guitars, and we give away coats, and we write songs about wrong-season kids. Those are small things. But the older I get, the more I suspect small things are the only real miracles we’re given the power to do on purpose.”

Mo’s drumstick tapped a slow, steady beat against their shoe: one, two, three, four. In their head, they were already hearing the shape of a song in it.

They did not decide to end the conversation so much as drift out of it.

At some point, the air in the hall shifted from charged to sleepy. The sounds from the rest of the building quieted. The distant vacuum stopped. The kitchen clatter faded. The heater kept its thin humming vigil, but even that noise had blended into the background roar of “late.”

Lena was the first to move.

Her knees had gone numb a while back; pins and needles told her it was time. She uncrossed her legs slowly, grimaced as feeling returned, and reached for the nearest loop of cable. It lay coiled on the floor like a shed snake skin. She picked it up and began winding it properly, elbow out, hand turning in a practiced rhythm.

“Sorry,” she said, half to the cable, half to the group. “If I don’t do this now, we’ll get yelled at by the morning crew.”

Mo pushed themself up with a grunt and dislodged the drumstick from behind their ear. “Yeah. Time to pretend we’re responsible adults,” they said. They began breaking down the kit, loosening wing nuts, laying toms gently into cases with the tenderness of someone putting a kid to bed.

Dante rose more slowly, stretching his back until it popped. He grabbed the nearest amp by its handle, tested its weight, and hefted it up against his side. It was heavier now than it had felt at load-in. Or maybe he was just more tired.

The circle on the floor unspooled along with the cables. Jennifer, left sitting for a moment in the center of the mess, looked almost surprised to find herself alone on the boards.

Then she made a small sound, something like a contented sigh, and got to her feet as well. Her knees complained, but she ignored them, bracing one hand briefly on the stage as she rose. The borrowed coat hung a little crooked on her shoulders, sleeves slightly too long. She pushed them up and stepped toward the nearest length of cord.

“You don’t have to—” Lena began.

“I know,” Jennifer said. “But I want to.”

She bent, picked up another cable, and began looping it with the slow competence of someone who had done this in halls and basements on three continents. Over-under, twist, over-under. Her hands remembered as easily as her voice remembered old songs.

The room changed shape as they moved. Empty floor space reappeared where gear had been. The low stage, once crowded with amps and monitors, became bare again, just wood and scuff marks and the faint outlines where gaffer tape had held setlists hostage.

Their conversation did not stop; it just broke into fragments, carried with them as they crossed and recrossed each other’s paths.

“Careful with that tom, the latch is—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.”

“Mo, don’t forget your snare, last time you—”

“I remember, I remember.”

Jennifer re-coiled a cable Rae had wrapped too hastily, laughing under her breath.

“You’re letting it get ideas above its station,” she said. “It’ll tangle just to spite you.”

Rae stuck their tongue out at her, then grinned despite themself. They reached for a mic stand, collapsing the legs and folding it down.

“How do you keep from letting one thing take over?” they asked suddenly, not looking at her. “The songs, the activism, the faith, whatever. It all feels like mint sometimes.”

“Mint?” she echoed.

“Yeah,” Rae said. “You plant a little because you think it’ll be nice in tea, and next thing you know the whole garden is mint and nothing else can grow.”

Jennifer chuckled, the sound low and pleased.

“Mint will do that,” she said. “I made that mistake once at a place I worked, a long time ago. Let it have a corner and it took the whole bed within two summers.”

“So?” Rae prompted. “What do you do instead?”

She thought as she wound, the cable growing into a neat black wreath in her hands.

“You keep a map of your garden,” she said. “Even if it’s only in your head. You decide how much space each plant gets before anything goes into the ground. Music here. Friends here. Whatever faith you can stomach here. And you keep checking, every so often: has anything hopped the fence?”

She glanced at Rae.

“If you find mint where the tomatoes should be,” she added, “you pull some up. You don’t burn the whole garden. You just… re-balance.”

Rae snorted. “Easier said than done,” they said.

“Everything is easier said than done,” she replied. “Saying it is just how we remind ourselves it’s possible.”

Dante passed them, burdened with the amp, catching the end of that.

“Does activism count as mint?” he asked.

“It can,” she said. “So can art. So can despair. So can God, in some people’s plots. Anything that insists on pushing out everything else needs a little pruning.”

He considered that as he maneuvered the amp onto a dolly near the back doors.

Mo scraped a cymbal stand closed, metal on metal. “Speaking of plots,” they said, “have you actually read any of the New Zealand zines lately? There’s this band in Wellington that sounds like someone fed your entire life into a blender with a tape echo machine.”

Jennifer’s face lit, unexpectedly youthful.

“Of course I have,” she said. “I get a packet every few months. One of the kids in Bologna has a cousin out there. He sends me whatever’s lying around.”

“You’re kidding,” Mo said. “You know Irrational Orchard?”

“I know their drummer can’t stay in one time signature to save his life,” she said. “And that their singer writes songs about factory fires and fairy tales. They remind me of some kids I knew in… ’71, maybe. Different accents, same bones.”

Mo grinned, delighted. “You’re more up to date than half the scene,” they said.

“I read what you write,” she said simply. “It’s how I remember the world is still… busy. Even when my town is quiet.”

They fell into a rhythm: Lena stacking cases by the door, Mo nesting cymbals in their bag, Dante hauling what his back could take, Rae ferrying armfuls of mic stands and pedals, Jennifer coiling the last of the cables and wiping a smear of something unidentifiable off the edge of the stage with a rag she found in a crate.

The hall grew emptier and more itself. The crooked WELCOME FRIENDS banner fluttered one last time when someone opened an exterior door to carry gear out to the van, a gust of cold air knifing in before the door shut again.

At last, there was nothing left on the floor but a few stray gaffer tape Xs and the faint ring where her styrofoam cup had sat. The PA loomed silently at the far end. The lights seemed harsher on the bare boards.

They gathered near the exit, all naturally converging under the halo of the buzzing emergency sign. The green light painted their faces the same colour, flattening differences, making them all look like kids caught in a photo booth.

Lena tugged on her jacket. Mo shrugged into a hoodie. Dante balanced the amp so he could open the door with his free hand. Rae lingered, one hand on the push-bar, the other fiddling with a loose thread on their sleeve.

“Is there anything you think we should definitely do?” Rae asked.

They hadn’t meant to say it out loud; it came out anyway, a little rough. “As a band, I mean. If you had to pick one thing.”

The question hung there with them under the buzzing green.

Jennifer looked at them, at all of them. Four faces in bad fluorescent light. Four wrong-season kids with callused fingers and too-big hearts. She didn’t answer right away. She seemed to be weighing a hundred sermons and slogans, a lifetime of advice she could give, and discarding almost all of it.

When she spoke, it was with the same plainness that had threaded through everything tonight.

“Make sure the songs feed someone before they feed you,” she said.

She let the words sit, unembellished.

“Feed how?” Dante asked quietly, almost reflexively.

“However they can,” she said. “With courage. With laughter. With information. With a reason to stick around one more night. Money, if it comes to that. But someone else’s hunger first, then yours. If you can keep that order, the rest will sort itself out.”

No manifesto. No five-point plan. Just that.

Rae nodded, slowly, feeling it lodge somewhere behind their ribs like a small, steady flame.

“Okay,” they said. “We can… try.”

“I’ll be glad if you do,” she said.

She stepped toward them then, one by one, in a simple, unhurried circuit.

First Lena: Jennifer took her hand in both of hers, the way older relatives did at funerals and weddings. Lena’s hands were rough from fretting strings and carrying gear; Jennifer’s were rough from different tools, same years. She gave a gentle squeeze, looked her in the eye, then let go.

Then Mo: her fingers wrapped around their callused drummer’s hands, thumb brushing for a second against the ridge where the stick always sat. “Tell Mark I said hello,” she murmured. “Even if you don’t tell him who I am.” Mo nodded, throat tight.

Dante next: she reached for his hand without ceremony. He tried to turn it into a handshake; she turned it into something softer, her other hand closing over his knuckles. There was no blessing spoken, but something passed anyway—permission, maybe, to be less words and more door-knocking. She smiled once, quick, then released him.

Finally Rae: she took their hands as if they were holding something fragile between them. Rae met her eyes, searching for some last instruction, some final theological bombshell. There was none. Just warmth, and a kind of quiet pride.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. “Not always. But enough.”

Rae nodded, not trusting themself to speak.

Then it was done. No group hug. No laying on of hands. No glowing aura. Just four quick, deliberate squeezes and the sense of a circuit completed.

She stepped back, pulled the borrowed coat tighter around her, and turned toward the door. Dante pushed it open; cold air slapped their faces, sudden and sharp, smelling of snow and exhaust and the faint metallic tang of the river.

For a heartbeat she was silhouetted there, small against the dirty glow of the parking lot lights. Then she stepped through.

They watched as she walked down the short flight of concrete stairs, boots careful on the thin rime of ice. Outside, her breath plumed in small clouds. The coat was still slightly too big, hanging off her shoulders like it belonged to someone taller, someone broader.

She didn’t look back. She tucked her hands into her sleeves, hunched a little against the cold, and set off down the sidewalk—just another figure on a winter night in Minneapolis, disappearing slowly into the grainy distance between the streetlights.